Wave packet approach to transport in mesoscopic systems

TL;DR

This paper applies wave packet methods to analyze electronic transport in mesoscopic nanodevices, enabling efficient computation of scattering properties across various energies and complex device topologies.

Contribution

It introduces a wave packet approach formulated as an initial value problem for the time-dependent Schrödinger equation to study transport in mesoscopic systems.

Findings

Efficient calculation of scattering and transmission coefficients.

Applicability to complex device topologies.

Ability to analyze energy-dependent transport properties.

Abstract

Wave packets provide a well established and versatile tool for studying time-dependent effects in molecular physics. Here, we demonstrate the application of wave packets to mesoscopic nanodevices at low temperatures. The electronic transport in the devices is expressed in terms of scattering and transmission coefficients, which are efficiently obtained by solving an initial value problem (IVP) using the time-dependent Schroedinger equation. The formulation as an IVP makes non-trivial device topologies accessible and by tuning the wave packet parameters one can extract the scattering properties for a large range of energies.