Project Heads
Patricio Farrell, Annegret Glitzky, Matthias Liero, Barbara Zwicknagl
Project Members
Petr Vágner (from 01/22 on), Grigor Nika (until 12/21)
Project Duration
01.01.2021 − 31.12.2022
Located at
WIAS
Mechanical strain has a strong impact on the electronic and optical properties of semiconductor materials. Therefore, strain engineering is crucial in novel optoelectronic device designs e.g. for Germanium microbridges or quantum dots. Also elastomeric polymer LEDs emit significant light if they are exposed to strains in the range of 120%.
Considerable strain is reached in quasi lower-dimensional structures like nano- and microwires or thin-film (organic) LEDs and solar cells. Our partners at Paul-Drude Institute (PDI) observe a strong influence of strain on the mobility in nanowires [4]. Whereas in practice such phenomena are often described by small-strain elasticity as input for charge-carrier transport and no backward coupling is taken into account, in this project we consider the full coupling in the finite-strain setting.
The project follows three main topics: (i) We derive nonlinear PDE models for the coupling of charge-carrier transport and finite-strain elasticity. We plan a consistent modeling using the GENERIC framework (see [1,6,7]) and want to seek the consistency with the small-strain setting. (ii) Our analytical investigations concern the isothermal situation with realistic mixed boundary conditions. For different temporal regimes we study the existence of solutions and their properties. Analytical tools are time discretization, Galerkin approximation, and Schauder’s fixed-point theorem. Moreover, we assume second-grade non-simple materials as in [8,9]. Additionally, we derive effective models for thin wires, where the elasticity is reduced to a 1D rod model, see [2], and the charge transport remains fully 3D. (iii) The final aim is develop and approve new numerical techniques for specific applications. We derive structure preserving discretizations based on finite-volume methods and generalized Scharfetter-Gummel schemes that include mechanical (small-) strain. Here, we combine the existing ddfermi solver for charge-transport with a linear elasticity solver. Additionally, we include the backward coupling to elasticity and perform simulations for single nanowire investigated at our partners at PDI.
External Website
Events
The Workshop Applied Mathematics and Simulation for Semiconductors and Electrochemical Systems AMaSiS 2021 took place from September 6-9, 2021
Related Publications
Related Pictures
Simulation picture by Y. Hadjimichael (WIAS Berlin)