Abstract
This paper presents a first step towards combining two well-established methods used in semiconductor physics—semiconductor Bloch equations and the Wigner approach to quantum transport. This combination provides the possibility of including spontaneous emission, i.e., the spontaneous recombination of excited electron–hole pairs in semiconductors, into the Wigner approach, which so far has been used only for systems with fixed particle number. The theory is presented and first numerical results for a three-dimensional system are shown.