Semiconductor nanodevices: Facing the fascinating world of quantum mechanics

The rapidly developing field of semiconductor-based nanomaterials and nanodevices unveils the intimate link between low-dimensional solid-state physics and fundamental quantum mechanics. The key tools of electronic quantum confinement and tunnel coupling are concepts that may be expressed and derived in terms of the corresponding Schrödinger equation. However, the interplay between carrier coherence and energy dissipation/decoherence in realistic electronic and optoelectronic nanodevices is highly non-trivial; the conventional theoretical treatments show up intrinsic limitations which are intimately related to the arbitrary separation between classical and quantum world, i.e., to the so-called measurement problem.