Abstract

I shall present two approaches to including the electron-electron interaction in theoretical descriptions of quantum transport of electrons through extended leads which connect a central device to reservoirs. For the steady-state response to small applied voltages, the conductance may be written exactly in terms of the density response function, which in turn may be directly calculated using many-body perturbation theory or time-dependent density-functional theory (TDDFT) [1]. For the response (transient or steady-state) to the application of larger voltages, we introduce the construction of a stroboscopic wavepacket basis set, facilitating physically transparent and numerically efficient calculations [2].

¹ Ab-initio formulation of the 4-point conductance of interacting electronic systems, P. Bokes, J. Jung and R.W. Godby, Phys. Rev. B 76 125433 (2007); M. Verstraete, P. Bokes and R.W. Godby, J. Chem. Phys. 130 124715 (2009) .

² Stroboscopic wavepacket description of non-equilibrium many-electron problems, P. Bokes, F. Corsetti and R. W. Godby, Phys. Rev. Lett. 101 046402 (2008).