The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-four-month research fellowship by Dr. Joseph Subotnik to work with Dr. Abraham Nitzan at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
Recent experimental advances, including the development of self-assembled monolayers (SAM's), have pushed forward research in nano-electronics, so that electrical engineers today can run and measure the current transported through a single molecule. It is hoped that, one day, this research will lead to the commercial development of molecular electronics, a feat which would revolutionize modern technology. There are, however, many barriers which must be overcome before molecular wires and junctions can be easily and stably manipulated: in particular, experimental research today is still quite difficult and only explanatory. For that reason, there is a strong need for the development of theoretical methods which can explain and complement experimental advances. One theoretical question which has arisen recently is: what is the role of electron-electron correlation in determining the current through a single molecule? Until now, most theoretical approaches have invoked density functional theory (DFT),which in practice is a single-electron, mean-field approach and does not treat correlation explicitly or adequately -- even though it can treat correlation exactly in principle. As an alternative, the role of electron-electron correlation in molecular conduction can be treated rigorously within the context of wave-function based methods. The principal investigator is developing an approach to do just that, working with the host (Abraham Nitzan) at Tel-Aviv University. In the future, it is hoped that a deeper understanding of electron-electron correlation will allow for accurate predictions and descriptions of the current passing through a single molecule, helping to push forward the development of molecular electronics.
