Optical Properties of Nanostructures

Nanotechnology has been named as one of the most important areas of forthcoming technology because it promises to form the basis of future generations of electronic and optoelectronic devices. From the point of view of technical physics, all these developments greatly reduce the geometric sizes of devices, and thus the number of active electrons in the system. Quantum mechanical considerations about electronic states, electron transports, and various scattering processes, including light–matter interaction, are thus crucial. However, the theoretical study is extremely difficult. The authors’ first numerical simulation work about a three-dimensional energy band structure calculation in 1995 took more than 6 months to complete for one bias configuration of a nanoscale metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor. With today’s computation workstations the CPU time is reduced to less than 24 hours.

This book discusses electrons and photons in and through nanostructures by the first-principles quantum mechanical theories and fundamental concepts (a unified coverage of nanostructured electronic and optical components) behind nanoelectronics and optoelectronics, the material basis, physical phenomena, device physics, as well as designs and applications. The combination of viewpoints presented in the book can help foster further research and cross-disciplinary interaction needed to surmount the barriers facing future generations of technology design.