Electron propagation along a nanowire: a study in chattering

Recent fabrication techniques have made it possible to create wires of submicron diameters, as small as a few tens of nanometers, and lengths of hundreds of microns. These nanowires have properties, including electrical conductivities, that differ greatly from the properties of the bulk material. It is necessary to simulate these characteristics of nanowires in an efficient and predictive fashion. While these structures are small on the scale of everyday objects, they still consist of thousands, if not millions, of nuclei and electrons, and hence a full a priori quantum mechanical treatment of these nanowires is not likely to be available in the near future. In this contribution, we present an efficient new approach for the simulation of electron transport along a nanowire. We see that our classical simulations, in which we have propagated one hundred thousand trajectories, result in chaotic scattering, that is chattering, of the electron.