Tight-binding methods for transport and optical properties in realistic nanostructures

Empirical and density-functional tight-binding approaches are applied to the study of organic and inorganic semiconductor nanostructures. We will show how tight binding relaxes all limitations of simplified approaches based on envelope function approximations, maintaining, at the same time, the computational cost low. We will present typical calculations for semiconductor nanostructures ranging from single quantum well up to nanostructured device in the presence of an electron current flow. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.