Theoretical study of the conductivity of an electrode/C60/electrode system

The recent development of molecular wires for electronic applications has attracted an increasing attention of the research workers to the study of the transport properties of nano systems[1-2], such as nanotubes, fullerenes and other molecules. The fullerene C60 molecule is among the most studied cases, where different numerical and experimental methods have been employed for the study of its electronic states and conductance. In this work we present a study on the conductivity of the electrode-C60-electrode system by using a simple model for the system.The C60 is modeled by a system of interconnected rings or assembly from rings model[4], which is, in fact, a collection of one dimensional chains with some atoms being interconnected in such a way to represent the hexagons and pentagons of the C60 molecule. Thus the Hamiltonian of the system is approximated by a tight-binding model for the π-electrons, where the only parameter is the hopping constant (t).Using a tight-binding approximation the electronic transmission through a C60 molecule is numerically investigated. Our calculations are based on the use of the Green’s function technique and Landauer formalism. The molecule is simulated according to assembly from rings model. Our results are in good agreement with the reported experimental measurements