Electrical resistance: an atomistic view
By Supriyo Datta. 2004
153 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This tutorial article presents a 'bottom-up' view of electrical resistance starting from something really small, like a molecule, and then discussing the issues that arise as we move to bigger conductors. Remarkably, no serious quantum mechanics is needed to understand electrical conduction through something really small, except for unusual things like the Kondo effect that are seen only for a special range of parameters. This article starts with energy level diagrams (section 2), shows that the broadening that accompanies coupling limits the conductance to a maximum of q2/h per level (sections 3, 4), describes how a change in the shape of the self-consistent potential profile can turn a symmetric current–voltage characteristic into a rectifying one (sections 5, 6), shows that many interesting effects in molecular electronics can be understood in terms of a simple model (section 7), introduces the non-equilibrium Green function (NEGF) formalism as a sophisticated version of this simple model with ordinary numbers replaced by appropriate matrices (section 8) and ends with a personal view of unsolved problems in the field of nanoscale electron transport (section 9). Appendix A discusses the Coulomb blockade regime of transport, while appendix B presents a formal derivation of the NEGF equations. MATLAB codes for numerical examples are listed in appendix C. (The appendices are available in the online version only.)
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Computational Theory and Mathematics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/86d0d0443ae12703cf28e68e1f8ee9f7efd4293f
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
In Computational Theory and Mathematics
In Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Performance analysis of carbon nanotube interconnects for VLSI applications (2005, background): “This is the fundamental resistance associated with a SWCNT that cannot be avoided [18].”
- On the Applicability of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes as VLSI Interconnects (2009, background): “This is the fundamental quantum of resistance associated with an SWCNT of length less than the mean free path of electrons [55] (l < λCNT ), which is typically 1 μm [8], [56], [57].”