Berlin 2012 – scientific programme
Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help
O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik
O 73: Focussed session: Frontiers of electronic structure theory: Strong correlations from first principles V (jointly with TT)
O 73.6: Talk
Thursday, March 29, 2012, 17:30–17:45, HE 101
Electron Tunneling - The Influence of Interaction — •Jessica Walkenhorst1, Nicole Helbig2, 1, Heiko Appel3, Angel Rubio1, and E.K.U. Gross4 — 1NanoBio Spectroscopy group and ETSF, Universidad del País Vasco, San Sebastián, Spain — 2Peter Grünberg Institut and Institute for Advanced Simulation, Forschungszentrum Jülich and JARA, Jülich, Germany — 3NanoBio Spectroscopy group and ETSF, Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin, Germany — 4MPI of Microstructure Physics, Halle, Germany
Electron tunneling plays a fundamental role in many chemical and physical processes and provides evidence of quantum mechanics at the macroscopic level. Whilst much effort has been devoted to modelling electron tunneling, doing so in a non-perturbative way remains a major challenge. Even though time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) has become a popular tool to describe and predict many electronic properties, it still fails to describe the tunneling process correctly. This failure of TDDFT is due to the electron-electron interaction being described only approximately through the exchange-correlation potential. To elucidate this further, we investigate the fingerprints of electron-electron interaction in few electron systems during the tunneling process. This is done by exact time propagation of electronic wave functions in different external potentials. For computational feasibility, we consider one-dimensional model Hamiltonians with variable electron-electron interaction.