Recently, the quantum nature in the energy transport in solar cells and light-harvesting complexes has attracted much attention as being triggered by the experimental observations. We model the light-harvesting complex (i.e., PEB50 dimer) as a quantum heat engine (QHE) and study the effect of the undamped intramolecule vibrational modes on the coherent energy-transfer process and quantum transp...

Studies of electronic charge transport through semiconductor double quantum dots rely on a conventional "hole" model of transport in the three-electron regime. We show that experimental measurements of charge transport through a Si double quantum dot in this regime cannot be fully explained using the conventional picture. Using a Hartree-Fock (HF) formalism and relevant HF energy parameters ext...

Efforts are made in this thesis to reveal the dynamics of single-electron tunneling and to realize quantum bits (qubits) in semiconductor quantum dots. At low temperatures, confined single quantum dots and double quantum dots are realized in the twodimensional electron gas (2DEG) of AlGaAs/GaAs heterostructures. For transport studies, quantum dots are coupled to the drain and source contacts vi...