Simplified tight-binding model for conductance calculation with phonon scattering for atomic junctions

Abstract

Intrigued by the high demand of fast design and development of nanoscale electronic devices, electronic transport across atomic dimensions becomes an important theoretical and computational problem. In this paper we present a tight-binding based model specially tailed for calculating realistic tunneling structures with scattering region dimensions of several nanometers. The proposed model allows for a proper treatment of the electron–phonon coupling effects in a tractable manner. By greatly reducing the complexity of the phonon-involved problem down to a quadratic level, transmission calculation for large-scale systems, including both planar structures and quantum wire structures, becomes practically feasible.