Aspects of Computational Science: a case study from semiconductor nano-structures

C. Voemel, ETH Zürich

Wednesday, October 29
at 16.15, HG E 1.1

Computational Science lies at the intersection of multiple scientific disciplines. Its intrinsic difficulty and beauty stem from this very inter-disciplinary setting: starting from an application problem, one has to conceive and analyze an appropriate model, to reduce the model to a dimension that is suitable for a computer simulation, to select the right numerical methods, and finally to implement these so that they run efficiently on modern computer architectures.

We discuss some of the aforementioned aspects by the example of photo luminescence of semiconductor nano-structures. Photo luminescence is an optical reaction of certain materials or material configurations to energetic excitation. Starting from a description of the physical effect, we briefly touch modeling by Schroedinger equations. By selection of a finite set of basis functions, we then arrive at eigenvalue problems with interesting properties. Their treatment by appropriate numerical methods will constitute the main part of this talk.