Abstract
AbstractWe shall discuss the role of electrical contacts within the conventional treatment of quantum devices based on the Wigner‐Function formalism. Our analysis will show that the artificial spatial separation between device active region and external reservoirs, being intrinsically incompatible with the non‐local character of quantum mechanics, may produce highly non‐physical results like boundary‐driven negative probability distributions.To overcome this serious limitation, we shall propose a new strategy to properly separate device and reservoir degrees of freedom, based on the well known projection techniques used in the formal theory of open systems. Our main result is a non‐Markovian master equation, where dissipation and dephasing phenomena are also induced by the presence of spatially external particle reservoirs. (© 2008 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
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