Galerkin methods for Boltzmann–Poisson transport with reflection conditions on rough boundaries

Highlights: • We model diffusive reflection boundary conditions in Boltzmann–Poisson electron transport and implement them in DG methods. • We develop a numerical pointwise zero flux condition at insulating boundaries, for mixed reflection with specularity $p\left(\overrightarrow{k}\right)$. • We compare the DG predictions for reflection BC, noticing diffusivity influences moments over the whole position domain. • Change in mean energy and velocity between collisionless and collisional systems, as function of diffusivity, is of interest. We consider in this paper the mathematical and numerical modeling of reflective boundary conditions (BC) associated to Boltzmann–Poisson systems, including diffusive reflection in addition to specularity, in the context of electron transport in semiconductor device modeling at nano scales, and their implementation in Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) schemes. We study these BC on the physical boundaries of the device and develop a numerical approximation to model an insulating boundary condition, or equivalently, a pointwise zero flux mathematical condition for the electron transport equation. Such condition balances the incident and reflective momentum flux at the microscopic level, pointwise at the boundary, in the case of a more general mixed reflection with momentum dependant specularity probability $p\left(\overrightarrow{k}\right)$. We compare the computational prediction of physical observables given by the numerical implementation of these different reflection conditions in our DG scheme for BP models, and observe that the diffusive condition influences the kinetic moments over the whole domain in position space.