The exciting field of nanostructured materials offers many challenging perspectives for fundamental research and technological applications. The combination of quantum mechanics, interaction, phase coherence, and magnetism are important for understanding many physical phenomena in these systems. This book provides an overview of many aspects of interacting electrons in nanostructures, including such interesting topics as quantum dots, quantum wires, molecular electronics, dephasing, spintronics, and nanomechanics. The content reflects the current research in this area and is written by leading experts in the field.

The exciting field of nanostructured materials offers many challenging perspectives for fundamental research and technological applications. The combination of quantum mechanics, interaction, phase coherence, and magnetism are important for understanding many physical phenomena in these systems. This book provides an overview of many aspects of interacting electrons in nanostructures, including such interesting topics as quantum dots, quantum wires, molecular electronics, dephasing, spintronics, and nanomechanics. The content reflects the current research in this area and is written by leading experts in the field.

Continuing miniaturization of electronic devices, together with the quickly growing number of nanotechnological applications, demands a profound understanding of the underlying physics. Most of the fundamental problems of modern condensed matter physics involve various aspects of quantum transport and fluctuation phenomena at the nanoscale. In nanostructures, electrons are usually confined to a limited volume and interact with each other and lattice ions, simultaneously suffering multiple scattering events on impurities, barriers, surface imperfections, and other defects. Electron interaction with other degrees of freedom generally yields two major consequences, quantum dissipation and quantum decoherence. In other words, electrons can lose their energy and ability for quantum interference even at very low temperatures. These two different, but related, processes are at the heart of all quantum phenomena discussed in this book. This book presents copious details to facilitate the understanding of the basic physics behind a result and the learning to technically reproduce the result without delving into extra literature. The book subtly balances the description of theoretical methods and techniques and the display of the rich landscape of the physical phenomena that can be accessed by these methods. It is useful for a broad readership ranging from master’s and PhD students to postdocs and senior researchers.

The purpose of this course was to give an overview of the physics of artificial semiconductor structures confining electrons and photons. It furnishes the background for several applications in particular in the domain of optical devices, lasers, light emitting diodes or photonic crystals. The effects related to the microactivity polaritons, which are mixed electromagnetic radiation-exciton states inside a semiconconductor microactivity are covered. The study of the characteristics of such states shows strong relations with the domain of cavity quantum electrodynamics and thus with the investigation of some fundamental theoretical concepts.

This textbook is aimed at second-year graduate students in Physics, Electrical Engineering, or Materials Science. It presents a rigorous introduction to electronic transport in solids, especially at the nanometer scale.Understanding electronic transport in solids requires some basic knowledge of Hamiltonian Classical Mechanics, Quantum Mechanics, Condensed Matter Theory, and Statistical Mechanics. Hence, this book discusses those sub-topics which are required to deal with electronic transport in a single, self-contained course. This will be useful for students who intend to work in academia or the nano/ micro-electronics industry.Further topics covered include: the theory of energy bands in crystals, of second quantization and elementary excitations in solids, of the dielectric properties of semiconductors with an emphasis on dielectric screening and coupled interfacial modes, of electron scattering with phonons, plasmons, electrons and photons, of the derivation of transport equations in semiconductors and semiconductor nanostructures somewhat at the quantum level, but mainly at the semi-classical level. The text presents examples relevant to current research, thus not only about Si, but also about III-V compound semiconductors, nanowires, graphene and graphene nanoribbons. In particular, the text gives major emphasis to plane-wave methods applied to the electronic structure of solids, both DFT and empirical pseudopotentials, always paying attention to their effects on electronic transport and its numerical treatment. The core of the text is electronic transport, with ample discussions of the transport equations derived both in the quantum picture (the Liouville-von Neumann equation) and semi-classically (the Boltzmann transport equation, BTE). An advanced chapter, Chapter 18, is strictly related to the ‘tricky’ transition from the time-reversible Liouville-von Neumann equation to the time-irreversible Green’s functions, to the density-matrix formalism and, classically, to the Boltzmann transport equation. Finally, several methods for solving the BTE are also reviewed, including the method of moments, iterative methods, direct matrix inversion, Cellular Automata and Monte Carlo. Four appendices complete the text.

This thesis constitutes a detailed study of functional nanostructures (ferromagnetic, superconducting, metallic and semiconducting) fabricated by focused electron/ion beam induced deposition techniques. The nanostructures were grown using different precursor materials such as Co2(CO)8, Fe2(CO)9, W(CO)6, (CH3)3Pt(CpCH3) and were characterized by a wide range of techniques. This work reports results obtained for the morphology, the microstructure, the composition, the electrical transport mechanism, magnetic and superconducting properties of nanostructures. The results offers exciting prospects in a wide range of applications in nanotechnology and condensed matter physics.