Towards a Chemically Driven Molecular Electron Pump

Charge can be pumped through a tiny gated portal from a reservoir at low electrochemical potential to one at the same or higher electrochemical potential by cyclically modulating the portal and gate energies. A theoretically and experimentally well established mechanism is Thouless adiabatic pumping, achieved by a precisely timed out-of-phase modulation of at least two parameters of the system. Here we show that stochastic modulation between two configurations of gate and portal energies can drive efficient pumping by a different, nonadiabatic, mechanism that may provide a basis for chemically driven electron pumping through a molecular wire.