THE NUMERICAL-SIMULATION OF ELECTRON TRANSMISSION THROUGH A 2-DIMENSIONAL QUANTUM DEVICE BY THE FINITE-ELEMENT METHOD

In this paper we present a method for numerically solving the Schrödinger equation for the problem of electron transmission through a quantum device defined on a two‐dimensional domain. An important aspect of our formulation is the treatment of the boundary conditions at the contact–device interfaces, allowing the problem to be discretized on the device domain only. With the FEM aproach that we employ, the nature of the potential field does not effect the computational expense (for smoothly varying fields). We examine a sample problem of a symmetric cavity in a wave‐guide structure. Copyright © 1990 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd