Atomistic Tight-Binding Approaches to Quantum Transport

Abstract

We discuss atomistic approaches to quantum transport within the semi-empirical tight-binding framework. We show that the latter is well suited to the study of present nanostructures such as carbon nanotubes, semiconductor nanowires and graphene. It indeed provides a very good balance between accuracy and efficiency, and can be coupled with ab initio methods to upscale the calculations to the mesoscopic limit. We discuss the implementation of the quantum Kubo-Greenwood and Green functions approaches, and some applications to carbon nanotubes, graphene and semiconductor nanowires. ©2009 IEEE.