Thomas Birkel with Walther Lambrecht

Modeling of Semiconducting Cylindrical Nanowires

Recently, advances have been made to create nanowires that are also ferromagnetic, creating the potential to apply these nanowires to spintronic technology.  The crystalline structure grown this way is cylindrical in shape, thereby requiring a cylindrical model to accurately determine the energies of the system. Taking into consideration the conduction of electrons in a crystalline solid, a Bloch envelope function is required to fully describe the wavefunction of a single electron in the nanowire. Furthermore, the semiconducting properties cause changes in the effective mass of the electron, due to the split degeneracy of higher and lower energy bands. Each of these qualities will be discussed, both analytically and numerically, as well as the possibility of a complete solution that accurately describes a semiconducting cylindrical nanowire.