Theory of tunneling transport in periodic chains

This is a self-contained discussion of a recently proposed theoretical approach for off-resonance tunneling transport. The final result is an analytic formula for the asymptotic tunneling conductance involving the overlap of three well-defined physical quantities that can be easily evaluated with the standard electronic structure codes. We argue that the formula can be used to gain fresh insight into the tunneling transport characteristics of various systems. The formalism is applied to molecular devices consisting of planar phenyl chains connected to gold electrodes via amine linkers.