Single- and many-particle description of scanning tunneling spectroscopy

Abstract

Scanning tunneling spectroscopy measures how a single electron with definite energy propagates between a sample surface and the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope. In the simplest description, the differential conductance measured is interpreted as the local density of states of the sample at the tip position. This picture, however, is insufficient in some cases, since especially smaller molecules weakly coupled with the substrate tend to have strong Coulomb interactions when an electron is inserted or removed at the molecule. We present theoretical approaches to go from the non-interacting and single-particle picture to the correlated many-body regime. The methodology is used to understand recent experiments on finite armchair graphene nanoribbons and phthalocyanines. We also theoretically discuss the strongly-correlated model system of fractional quantum Hall droplets.