Electronic transport through nanowires: a real-space finite-difference approach

Nanoelectronics is a fast developing ¯eld. Therefore understanding of the electronic transport at the nanoscale is currently of great interest. This thesis "Electronic transport through nanowires: a real-space ¯nite-difference approach" aims at a general theoretical treatment of coherent electronic transport in mesoscopic and mi- croscopic systems by means of Green's function and mode-matching techniques. A general method has been developed for conductance calculations on the basis of the mode-matching technique within the real-space high-order ¯nite-difference scheme for representing a single electron equation. Testing of this real-space ¯nite-di®erence approach for model systems has been done. This approach in combination with the density-functional formalism has been applied to the conductance calculations in nanowires. The stability of even-odd conductance oscillations in monatomic sodium wires with respect to structural variations has been investigated.