Teaching

We believe that the NEGF method (click here to know more about it) deserves a far more prominent place in our curriculum than its present status as an esoteric tool for specialists. We hope our unique viewpoint will help establish the NEGF method as a part of the standard training of physics and engineering students so that they can apply it effectively to a wide variety of basic and applied problems that require "connecting contacts to the Schrodinger equation" Click here for a simple example.

With this in mind, we have developed two complementary courses, the first for undergraduate students and the latter for graduate students, assuming no prior background other than linear algebra. There is some overlap, but are designed so that they complement each other and can be taken in any order. Lectures for both courses have been videotaped by the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN) and made available to the general public through its science portal, the nanoHUB.

The problem of current flow touches on some of the deepest issues of physics related to the nature of "friction" on a microscopic scale and the emergence of irreversibility from reversible laws. As such we believe that the NEGF-Landauer approach will be of interest to a much broader community outside the field of nanoelectronics. With this in mind we have been trying to convey the general insights to a wider audience assuming very little background. Lectures from a 5-day summer school held in July 2008, entitled Nanoelectronics and the Meaning of Resistance are available here.

I am working on improving these lectures and developing detailed notes to accompany them. This is part of a new educational initiative entitled Electronics from the bottom-up sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Intel Foundation involving my colleagues, Mark Lundstrom and Ashraf Alam.