Conductance of three-dimensional cross junctions in the quantum ballistic regime

Abstract

The influence of dimensionality on the conductance of semiconductor cross junctions is investigated in the effective mass approximation and quantum ballistic regime. Our calculations exhibit some similar features for both two-and three-dimensional models, namely the conductance peaks before the fundamental eigenenergy of the quantum wire that represents the sidearms and the zero conductance dip. Despite this, we show that, in general, the conductance and the electronic wave function are strongly affected when the third spatial dimension is taken into account. In other words, we prove that two-dimensional models are not suitable for representing this kind of system.