Nonequilibrium mean-field approach for quantum transport with off-diagonal disorder

Abstract

For the nanoscale structures, disorder scattering plays a vital role in the carriers' transport, including electrons and high-frequency phonons. The capability for effectively treating the disorders, including both diagonal and off-diagonal disorders, is indispensable for quantum transport simulation of realistic device materials. In this work, we report a self-consistent nonequilibrium mean-field quantum transport approach, by combining the auxiliary coherent potential approximation (ACPA) and non-equilibrium Green's function method, for calculating the phonon transport through disordered material structures with the force-constant disorders (including the Anderson-type disorder). The nonequilibrium vertex correction (NVC) is derived in an extended local degree of freedom to account for both the multiple disorder scattering by force-constant disorder and the nonequilibrium quantum statistics. We have tested ACPA-NVC method with the fluctuation-dissipation theorem at the equilibrium and obtained very good agreement with supercell calculations for the phonon transmission. To demonstrate the applicability, we apply ACPA-NVC to calculate the thermal conductance for the disordered Ni/Pt interface, and important effects of force-constant disorder are revealed. ACPA-NVC method provides an effective quantum transport approach for simulating disordered nanoscale devices, and the generalization to simulate disordered nanoelectronic device is straightforward.