The course provides a hands-on experience for graduate students in sciences (physics, chemistry) and engineering (electrical, chemical, materials), as well as advanced undergraduates, to analyze electronic structure and transport properties of basic classes of carbon, semiconductor, and magnetic nanostructures explored at the current research frontiers.
Nanostructures in equilibrium: electronic structure of graphene and other two-dimensional materials, carbon nanotubes, topological insulators, magnetic multilayers.
Nanostructure out of equilibrium: quantum transport effects, such as conductance quantization, signatures of quantum interference in conductance, spin-dependent tunneling, spin and quantum Hall effects, spin torque, I-V curves.
Theoretical techniques: semi-empirical tight-binding models, density functional theory (DFT) for first-principles modeling, Landauer-Büttiker scattering formalism, nonequilibrium Green's functions (NEGF), NEGF+DFT techniques.
Experimental techniques: scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopy.
Portion of the course material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ECCS 0725566. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
