Kinetic Schemes in Open Interacting Systems

We discuss utilization of kinetic schemes for description of open interacting systems, focusing on vibrational energy relaxation for an oscillator coupled to a nonequilibirum electronic bath. Standard kinetic equations with constant rate coefficients are obtained under the assumption of timescale separation between system and bath, with the bath dynamics much faster than that of the system of interest. This assumption may break down in certain limits and we show that ignoring this may lead to qualitatively wrong predictions. Connection with more general, nonequilibrium Green's function (NEGF) analysis, is demonstrated. Our considerations are illustrated within generic molecular junction models with electron-vibration coupling.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figure

Nuclear dynamics at molecule-metal interfaces: A pseudoparticle perspective

We discuss nuclear dynamics at molecule-metal interfaces including non-equilibrium molecular junctions. Starting from the many-body states (pseudoparticle) formulation of the molecule-metal system in the molecular vibronic basis, we introduce gradient expansion in order to reduce the adiabatic nuclear dynamics (that is, nuclear dynamics on a single molecular potential surface) into its semi-classical form while maintaining the effect of the non-adiabatic electronic transitions between different molecular charge states. This yields a set of equations for the nuclear dynamics in the presence of these non-adiabatic transitions, which reproduce surface hopping formulation in the limit of small metal-molecule coupling (where broadening of the molecular energy levels can be disregarded) and Ehrenfest dynamics (motion on the potential of mean force) when information on the different charging states is traced out, which is relevant when this coupling is strong.Comment: 9 page