Landauer limit transport

Mesoscopic physics has defined many of the issues (Landauer limit transport [10, 11], Coulomb blockade regime [12], Kondo resonance regime [13-15]...) that will occur later in this chapter describing molecular transport junctions. These concepts are relevant, but must be reinterpreted to understand the molecular case. 

In mesoscopic physics, because the geometries can be controlled so well, and because the measurements are very accurate, current under different conditions can be appropriately measured and calculated. The models used for mesoscopic transport are the so-called Landauer/Imry/Buttiker elastic scattering model for current, correlated electronic structure schemes to deal with Coulomb blockade limit and Kondo regime transport, and charging algorithms to characterize the effects of electron populations on the quantum dots. These are often based on capacitance analyses (this is a matter of thinking style - most chemists do not consider capacitances when discussing molecular transport junctions). 

In the Landauer/Imry limit, the transport through the junction is due to elastic scattering. If the gap between the injection energy and the frontier orbital resonance is large, the Landauer/Buttiker contact time is very small, so that the charge is present on the molecule for a very short time. This means that its interaction with any vibration will be weak, because there just is not time to complete a full vibrational period before the charge has gone into the electrode sink. 

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