Recent observation of efficient luminescence in porous silicon has stimulated interest in the electronic and optical properties of Si quantum wires [1,2,3]. If silicon becomes a material suitable for optical applications, techniques for fabricating silicon wires reliably and uniformly will be needed. Once this is achieved, there will be interest not only in optical properties of silicon wires but also transport properties. For instance, to determine the properties of a hypothetical Si LED, one needs to know about both transport and optical properties.

In this paper, we present theoretical studies of electronic, optical and transpon properties of silicon quantum wires ranging in size from 7.7Ä to 31Ä. The electronic and optical properties are treated in an empirical tight-binding approach with excitonic effects included in the effective mass approximation. Carrier transport is treated in a Boltzmann transport framework with nonpolar deformation potential acoustic phonon scattering being the dominant scattering mechanism.