Transport through semiconductor nanostructures is a quantum-coherent process. This review focuses on systems in which the electron's dynamics is ballistic and the transport is dominated by the scattering from structure boundaries. Opposite to the well-known case of the nuclear reactions, the potentials defining semiconductor structures are nonspherically symmetric and the asymptotic motion of the electrons is determined by the different potential levels in the contacts. For this special type of potential the mathematical foundations for the scattering theoretical description of the transport phenomena are presented. The transport properties of the system are then derived from the scattering matrix using the Landauer-Büttiker formalism. A rigorous analysis of the analytical properties of the S matrix leads to the most general resonant line shape described by a Fano function with a complex asymmetry parameter. On this basis the resonant and nonresonant contributions to the conductance and capacitance of the system are identified.

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We analyze a quantum dot strongly coupled to the conducting leads via quantum point contacts -Fano regime of transport -and report a variety of resonant states which demonstrate the dominance of the interacting resonances in the scattering process in a low confining potential. There are resonant states similar to the eigenstates of the isolated dot, whose widths increase with increasing the coupling strength to the environment, and hybrid resonant states. The last ones are approximatively obtained as a linear combination of eigenstates with the same parity in the lateral direction, and the corresponding resonances show the phenomena of resonance trapping or level repulsion. The existence of the hybrid modes suggests that the open quantum dot behaves in the Fano regime like an artificial molecule.