Transport Phoneomena at the Nanoscale

The development of Nanotechnology has enabled the possibilities to fabricate devices and structures at nanoscale (on the order of few nm). The properties of such nanostructures cannot be described by macroscopic physical models like drift-diffusion equations. And that is where the fundamental constants of nature (e.g. charge of an electron, Planck’s constant, spin of an electron, etc) come into play. The purpose of this seminar is to describe how these fundamental constants can be connected with the transport phenomenon at nanoscale and how we can come up with a formalism that can describe the transport phenomenon in these nanostructures in terms of the atomistic theory of matter. We will start with a simple one level model to describe transport through individual molecular levels and then extend our discussion to transport through quantum wires using Nonequilibirum Green’s Function (NEGF) methodology. Then we will discuss how to include interactions in our formalism which will connect this formalism to Ohm’s Law.