ac current in nonequilibrium mesoscopic systems Original Research Article

A transfer-matrix method to study ac transport in harmonically driven mesoscopic electron systems has been developed. This method makes it possible to calculate, without consuming a large amount of computing time and memory space, nonlinear ac currents in nonequilibrium systems by means of transmission and reflection amplitudes of electrons through sideband states produced by the oscillating potential. We also discuss a way to take a thermal average of the ac current at a finite temperature under a finite dc-bias voltage. Simple applications of this method exhibit the efficiency of this numerical technique.