Computational quantum transport

Xavier Waintal, Michael Wimmer, Anton Akhmerov, Christoph Groth, Branislav K. Nikolic, Mathieu Istas, Tómas Örn Rosdahl, Daniel Varjas

Published 2024-07-23Version 1

This review is devoted to the different techniques that have been developed to compute the coherent transport properties of quantum nanoelectronic systems connected to electrodes. Beside a review of the different algorithms proposed in the literature, we provide a comprehensive and pedagogical derivation of the two formalisms on which these techniques are based: the scattering approach and the Green's function approach. We show that the scattering problem can be formulated as a system of linear equations and that different existing algorithms for solving this scattering problem amount to different sequences of Gaussian elimination. We explicitly prove the equivalence of the two formalisms. We discuss the stability and numerical complexity of the existing methods.