Noise and thermodynamic uncertainty relation in "underwater" molecular junctions

Henning Kirchberg*, Abraham Nitzan

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

We determine the zero-frequency charge current noise in a metal-molecule-metal junction embedded in a thermal environment, e.g., a solvent, dominated by sequential charge transmission described by a classical master equation, and we study the dependence of specific model parameters, i.e., the environmental reorganization energy and relaxation behavior. Interestingly, the classical current noise term has the same structure as its quantum analog, which reflects a charge correlation due to the bridging molecule. We further determine the thermodynamic uncertainty relation (TUR) defininig a bound on the relationship between the average charge current, its fluctuation, and the entropy production in an electrochemical junction in the Marcus regime. In the second part, we use the same methodology to calculate the current noise and the TUR for a protoype photovoltaic cell in order to predict its upper bound for the efficiency of energy conversion into useful work.

Original languageEnglish
Article number184304
JournalJournal of Chemical Physics
Volume157
Issue number18
DOIs
StatePublished - 14 Nov 2022
Externally publishedYes

Funding

FundersFunder number
National Science FoundationCHE1953701
University of Pennsylvania

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