Symmetric Galerkin boundary element method for computing the quantum states of the electron in a piecewise-uniform mesoscopic system

Abstract

The quantum behavior of charge carriers in semiconductor structures is often described in terms of the effective mass Schr\"{o}dinger equation, neglecting the rapid fluctuations of the wave function on the scale of the atomic lattice. For systems with piecewise-constant mass and potential energy, this amounts to solving a set of Helmholtz equations with wavenumbers dictated by the physical parameters of each homogeneous subregion. Making use of the Green function method, the system of differential equations can be expressed in boundary integral form to enable efficient numerical solution. In the present study, this strategy is applied in combination with a Galerkin technique to compute the energy spectrum and the wave functions of the electron in a mesoscopic structure composed of two regions. The proposed formulation differs from those presented before for the same scenario in that it implements a symmetric discretization of the four Helmholtz boundary integral operators, which leads to compact expressions and very accurate results.