Time-domain simulation of quantum nanostructures

Summary form only given. Along with the growing body of experimental work on semiconductor quantum dots, there have been efforts to characterize these interactions through approximation techniques. This paper presents a formulation of the Hartree-Fock approximation using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method to simulate two particles in a quantum dot. The FDTD method is one of the most widely used methods in electromagnetic simulation and it has recently been applied to the simulation of the Schroedinger equation. The computational intensity of the Coulomb and exchange terms are partly circumvented by using signal-processing techniques and a two-dimensional fast Fourier transform. While the resulting simulation is computationally intense, it is well within the realm of state-of-the-art computing platforms. This technique allows for the simulation of two-electron wavepacket dynamics as well as the determination of energy eigenstates.