Abstract

Today, there are many practical applications of nanostructures and nanomaterials. For example, the quantum Hall effect now serves as a standard measurement for resistance. Quantum dots are used in many modern application areas including quantum dot lasers in optics, fluorescent tracers in biological and medical settings, and quantum information processing. The theory of nanostructures involves a broad range of physical concepts, from the simple confinement effects to the complex many-body physics, such as the Kondo and fractional quantum Hall effects. Traditional condensed matter and quantum many-body theory all have the role to play in understanding and learning how to control nanostructures as a practically useful device. From the theoretical point of view, electron transport in nanostructures deals mainly with physics of systems consisting of a nanoscale active region (the device system) attached to multi-leads (including source and drain).