Parameter-free driven Liouville-von Neumann approach for time-dependent electronic transport simulations in open quantum systems

A parameter-free version of the recently developed driven Liouville-von Neumann equation [T. Zelovich et al., J. Chem. Theory Comput. 10(8), 2927-2941 (2014)] for electronic transport calculations in molecular junctions is presented. The single driving rate, appearing as a fitting parameter in the original methodology, is replaced by a set of state-dependent broadening factors applied to the different single-particle lead levels. These broadening factors are extracted explicitly from the self-energy of the corresponding electronic reservoir and are fully transferable to any junction incorporating the same lead model. The performance of the method is demonstrated via tight-binding and extended Hückel calculations of simple junction models. Our analytic considerations and numerical results indicate that the developed methodology constitutes a rigorous framework for the design of "black-box" algorithms to simulate electron dynamics in open quantum systems out of equilibrium.