Electronic properties of silicon nanowires

This paper investigates the electronic structure of Si nanowires demonstrating the effect of wire thickness on the bangap, conduction valley splitting, hole band splitting, effective masses, and transmission. We use two different models, a three-dimensional (3D) discretization of the single-band effective mass equation, and a nearest neighbor sp/sup 3/d/sup 5/s* model, where the Hamiltonian matrix elements, are optimized with a genetic algorithm. Transmission coefficients are calculated using the non-equilibrium Green function (NEGF) formalism with a recursive Green function algorithm.