Cooperative effects in inelastic tunneling

Several aspects of intermolecular effects in molecular conduction have been studied in recent years. These experimental and theoretical studies, made on several setups of molecular conduction junctions, have focused on the current-voltage characteristic that is usually dominated by the elastic transmission properties of such junctions. In this paper, we address cooperative intermolecular effects in the inelastic tunneling signal calculated for simple generic models of such systems. We find that peak heights in the inelastic (d²I/dE² vs E) spectrum may be affected by such cooperative effects even when direct intermolecular interactions can be disregarded. This finding suggests that comparing experimental results to calculations made on single-molecule junctions should be done with care.