ABSTRACT
Semiconductor nanostructures have been investigated for some time and have been shown to possess a wide variety of transport properties. In the structure of U. Meirav and co-workers, the modulation of a gate potential over a quantum dot under slight source-drain basis leads to a highly periodic array of thermally broadened conductance peaks. In order to achieve a quantitative level of accuracy, a three-dimensional self-consistent treatment is required which implicitly takes into account the interplay between the statistical and quantum-mechanical properties of the confinement geometry. The quantitative assessment of single-electron charging effects requires the use of self-consistent models which incorporate thorough treatments of quantum mechanics and carrier statistics. Boundary conditions for the Schrodinger equation are imposed by assuming vanishing wave functions around the perimeter of each quantized region. The primary focus of our model is the evaluation of local electronic eigenenergies in each quantized region, and their subsequent use in the calculation of charge densities and transport characteristics.
