Single-electron device simulation

A three-dimensional (3-D) simulator is presented which uses a linear-response approach to simulate the conductance of semiconductor single-electron transistors at the solid-state level. The many-particle groundstate of the quantum dot, weakly connected to the drain and the source reservoir, is evaluated in a self-consistent manner including quantum-mechanical many-body interactions. A transfer-Hamiltonian approach is used to compute the tunneling rates for the coupling of the quantum dot levels to the macroscopic reservoirs on the basis of realistic barrier potentials. The simulator was applied to a GaAs/AlGaAs example structure. We discuss the conductance characteristic and the capacitances as well as the microscopic structure of the quantum dot.