Efficient Modeling of Electron Transport with Plane Waves

Abstract

We present a method to simulate ballistic quantum transport in one-dimensional nanostructures, such as extremely scaled transistors, with a channel of nanowires or nanoribbons. In contrast to most popular approaches, we develop our method employing an accurate plane-wave basis at the atomic scale while retaining the numerical efficiency of a localized (tight-binding) basis at larger scales. At the core of our method is a finite-element expansion, where the finite element basis is enriched by a set of Bloch waves at high-symmetry points in the Brillouin zone of the crystal. We demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our method with the self-consistent simulation of ballistic transport in graphene nanoribbon FETs.