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An efficient method inspired by the traditional body of revolution finite-difference time-domain (BOR-FDTD) method is developed to solve the Schrodinger equation for rotationally symmetric problems. As test cases, spherical, cylindrical, cone-like quantum dots, harmonic oscillator, and spherical quantum dot with hydrogenic impurity are investigated to check the efficiency of the proposed method which we coin as Quantum BOR-FDTD (Q-BOR-FDTD) method. The obtained results are analysed and compared to the 3-D FDTD method, and the analytical solutions. Q-BOR-FDTD method proves to be very accurate and time and memory efficient by reducing a three-dimensional problem to a two-dimensional one, therefore one can employ very fine meshes to get very precise results. Moreover, it can be exploited to solve problems including hydrogenic impurities which is not an easy task in the traditional FDTD calculation due to singularity problem. To demonstrate its accuracy, we consider spherical and cone-like core-shell QD with hydrogenic impurity. Comparison with analytical solutions confirms that Q-BOR–FDTD method is very efficient and accurate for solving Schrodinger equation for problems with hydrogenic impurity

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Due to the increasing importance of nanosensors in the early diagnosis of diseases, the need for high-performance nanosensors is one of the goals of researchers. In this paper, a structure consisting of plasmonic nanoshells with spherical and ellipsoidal geometry has been proposed to calculate the refractive index (RI) changes in the range of 1–3. The sensitivity of the proposed nanosensor has been computed, and the effective factors on the performance of the nanosensor, including geometry, material, core dimensions, shell thickness, and RI of the surrounding environment are studied. To this end, various nanostructures have been modeled using the boundary element method. It has been shown that ellipsoidal nanoshells are more sensitive to RI changes than spherical nanoshells. Also, the results show that nanoshells with a core and shell made of plasmonic metals (bimetallic nanoshell) can exponentially increase the sensitivity of the nanosensor.

We discuss the rules for designing nanostructured plasmonic backcontact of thin-film crystalline silicon solar cells using two-dimensional finite-difference time-domain (2D-FDTD) method. A novel efficient quasi-periodic plasmonic nanograting is designed. Numerical calculations demonstrate that broadband and polarization-insensitive absorption enhancement is achieved by the proposed structure which is based on a supercell geometry containing N subcells in each of which there is one Ag nanowire deposited on the backcontact of the solar cell. The proposed structure offers the possibility of controlling the number and location of photonic and plasmonic modes and outperforms the periodic plasmonic nanogratings which only utilize plasmonic resonances. We start by tuning the plasmonic mode of one subcell and then construct the supercell based on the final design of the subcell. Our findings show that with a proper choice of key parameters of the nanograting, several photonic and plasmonic modes can be excited across the entire spectral region where crystalline silicon (c-Si) is absorbing. The absorption enhancement is significant, particularly in the long wavelength region where c-Si is weakly absorbing.