Nonlinear effects of phonon fluctuations on transport through nanoscale junctions

D. F. Urban, R. Avriller, A. Levy Yeyati

Published 2010-06-02, updated 2010-10-13Version 2

We analyze the effect of electron-phonon coupling on the full counting statistics of a molecular junction beyond the lowest order perturbation theory. Our approach allows to take into account analytically the feedback between the non-equilibrium phonon and electronic distributions in the quantum regime. We show that even for junctions with high transmission and relatively weak electron-phonon coupling this feedback gives rise to increasingly higher nonlinearities in the voltage dependence of the cumulants of the transmitted charges distribution.