No abstract

Charge transfer is a fundamental process that underlies a multitude of phenomena in chemistry and biology. Recent advances in observing and manipulating charge and heat transport at the nanoscale, and recently developed techniques for monitoring temperature at high temporal and spatial resolution, imply the need for considering electron transfer across thermal gradients. Here, a theory is developed for the rate of electron transfer and the associated heat transport between donor-acceptor pairs located at sites of different temperatures. To this end, through application of a generalized multidimensional transition state theory, the traditional Arrhenius picture of activation energy as a single point on a free energy surface is replaced with a bithermal property that is derived from statistical weighting over all configurations where the reactant and product states are equienergetic. The flow of energy associated with the electron transfer process is also examined, leading to relations between the rate of heat exchange among the donor and acceptor sites as functions of the temperature difference and the electronic driving bias. In particular, we find that an open electron transfer channel contributes to enhanced heat transport between sites even when they are in electronic equilibrium. The presented results provide a unified theory for charge transport and the associated heat conduction between sites at different temperatures. T he study of electronic transport in molecular nanojunctions naturally involves consideration of inelastic transport, where the transporting electron can exchange energy with underlying nuclear motions (1, 2). Such studies have been motivated by the use of inelastic tunneling spectroscopy, and more recently Raman spectroscopy, as diagnostic tools on one hand, and by considerations of junction stability on the other. In parallel, there has been an increasing interest in vibrational heat transport in nanostructures and their interfaces with bulk substrates (3-11) focusing on structure-transport correlations (12-15), moleculesubstrate coupling (16-18), ballistic and diffusive transport processes (11,19), and rectification (20-22). More recently, noise (23-26), nonlinear response (e.g., negative differential heat conductance), and control by external stimuli (27, 28) have been examined. An important driving factor in this growing interest is the development of experimental capabilities that greatly improve on the ability to gauge temperatures (and "effective" temperatures in nonequilibrium systems) with high spatial and thermal resolutions (29-43) and to infer from such measurement the underlying heat transport processes. In particular, vibrational energy transport/ heat conduction in molecular layers and junctions has recently been characterized using different probes (6,19,(44)(45)(46)(47)(48)(49)(50)(51)(52).The interplay between charge and energy (electronic and nuclear) transport (53-60) is of particular interest as it pertains to the performance of energy-conversion devices, such as therm...

When a chemical reaction is driven by an external field, the transition state that the system must pass through as it changes from reactant to product—for example, an energy barrier—becomes time-dependent. We show that for periodic forcing the rate of barrier crossing can be determined through stability analysis of the non-autonomous transition state. Specifically, strong agreement is observed between the difference in the Floquet exponents describing stability of the transition state trajectory, which defines a recrossing-free dividing surface [G. T. Craven, T. Bartsch, and R. Hernandez, “Persistence of transition state structure in chemical reactions driven by fields oscillating in time,” Phys. Rev. E 89, 040801(R) (2014)], and the rates calculated by simulation of ensembles of trajectories. This result opens the possibility to extract rates directly from the intrinsic stability of the transition state, even when it is time-dependent, without requiring a numerically expensive simulation of the long-time dynamics of a large ensemble of trajectories.

The time-dependent geometrical separatrices governing state transitions in field-induced ketene isomerization are constructed using the method of Lagrangian descriptors. We obtain the stable and unstable manifolds of time-varying transition states as dynamic phase space objects governing configurational changes when the ketene molecule is subjected to an oscillating electric field. The dynamics of the isomerization reaction are modeled through classical trajectory studies on the Gezelter-Miller potential energy surface and an approximate dipole moment model which is coupled to a time-dependent electric field. We obtain a representation of the reaction geometry, over varying field strengths and oscillation frequencies, by partitioning an initial phase space into basins labeled according to which product state is reached at a given time. The borders between these basins are in agreement with those obtained using Lagrangian descriptors, even in regimes exhibiting chaotic dynamics. Major outcomes of this work are: validation and extension of a transition state theory framework built from Lagrangian descriptors, elaboration of the applicability for this theory to periodically- and aperiodically-driven molecular systems, and prediction of regimes in which isomerization of ketene and its derivatives may be controlled using an external field.