What’s the big iDEA?

The iDEA code has been developed to explore small model systems of interacting electrons, in order to gain insight into the crucial features present in time-dependent many-electron systems. This is allowing us to tackle important challenges in this area, e.g. developing an accurate description of electronic quantum transport - time-dependent electrical currents carried by electrons in response to an applied voltage - through nanostructures and nanodevices.

We use exact solutions of the many-electron time-dependent Schrödinger equation to study the performance of non-equilibrium Green’s-function theory and time-dependent density-functional theory (TDDFT), along with a powerful reverse-engineering technique which allows us to calculate the exact exchange-correlation functionals in TDDFT.