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Physical Review Letters

Voltage-Biased Quantum Wire with Impurities

Reinhold Egger, Hermann Grabert

Published Jul 15, 1996• 60 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The bosonization technique to describe correlated electrons in a one-dimensional quantum wire containing impurities is extended to include an applied voltage source. The external reservoirs are shown to lead to a boundary condition for the boson phase fields. We use the formalism to investigate the channel conductance, electroneutrality, and charging effects.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.77.538

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The bosonization technique to describe correlated electrons in a one-dimensional quantum wire containing impurities is extended to include an applied voltage source. The external reservoirs are shown to lead to a boundary condition for the boson phase fields. We use the formalism to investigate the channel conductance, electroneutrality, and charging effects.
The Landauer approach to transport in mesoscopic conductors has been generalized to allow for strong electronic correlations in a single-channel quantum wire. We describe in detail how to account for external voltage sources in adiabatic contact with a quantum wire containing a backscatterer of arbitrary strength. Assuming that the quantum wire is in the Luttinger liquid state, voltage sources lead to radiative boundary conditions applied to the displacement field employed in the bosonization scheme. We present the exact solution of the transport problem for arbitrary backscattering strength at the special Coulomb interaction parameter g=1/2.g=1/2.g=1/2.
We (re)consider in this paper the problem of tunnelling through an impurity in a quantum wire with arbitrary Luttinger interaction parameter. By combining the integrable approach developed in the case of quantum Hall edge states with the introduction of radiative boundary conditions to describe the adiabatic coupling to the reservoirs, we are able to obtain the exact equilibrium and non-equilibrium current. One of the most striking features observed is the appearance of negative differential conductances out of equilibrium in the strongly interacting regime g ⩽0.2. In spite of the various charging effects, a remarkable form of duality is still observed. New results on the computation of transport properties in integrable impurity problems are gathered in the appendices. In particular, we prove that the TBA results satisfy a remarkable relation, originally derived using the Keldysh formalism, between the order T 2 correction to the current out of equilibrium and the second derivative of this current at T = 0 with respect to the voltage: this is the first direct link between the TBA approach out of equilibrium and the traditional Keldysh one
The inhomogeneous Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid model describing an interacting quantum wire adiabatically coupled to noninteracting leads is analyzed in the presence of a weak impurity within the wire. Due to strong electronic correlations in the wire, the effects of impurity backscattering, finite bias, finite temperature, and finite length lead to characteristic nonmonotonic parameter dependencies of the average current. We discuss oscillations of the nonlinear current voltage characteristics that arise due to reflections of plasmon modes at the impurity and quasi-Andreev reflections at the contacts, and show how these oscillations are washed out by decoherence at finite temperature. Furthermore, the finite-frequency current noise is investigated in detail. We find that the effective charge extracted in the shot noise regime in the weak backscattering limit decisively depends on the noise frequency $\ensuremath{\omega}$ relative to vF∕gL{v}_{F}∕gLvF​∕gL, where vF{v}_{F}vF​ is the Fermi velocity, ggg the Tomonaga-Luttinger interaction parameter, and LLL the length of the wire. The interplay of finite bias, finite temperature, and finite length yields rich structure in the noise spectrum which crucially depends on the electron-electron interaction. In particular, the excess noise, defined as the change of the noise due to the applied voltage, can become negative and is nonvanishing even for noise frequencies larger than the applied voltage, which are signatures of correlation effects.
We study the transport properties of a quantum wire, described by the Tomonaga-Luttinger model, in the presence of a backscattering potential provided by several extended time-dependent impurities (barriers). Employing the B\"uttiker-Landauer approach, we first consider the scattering of noninteracting electrons (g=1)(g=1)(g=1) by a rectangularlike barrier and find an exact solution for the backscattering current, as well as a perturbative solution for a weak static potential with an arbitrary shape. We then include electron-electron interactions and use the Keldysh formalism combined with the bosonization technique to study oscillating extended barriers. We show that the backscattering current off time-dependent impurities can be expressed in terms of the current for the corresponding static barrier. Then we determine the backscattering current for a static extended potential, which, in the limit of noninteracting electrons (g=1)(g=1)(g=1), coincides with the result obtained using the B\"uttiker-Landauer formalism. In particular, we find that the conductance can be increased beyond its quantized value in the whole range of repulsive interactions 0<g<10<g<10<g<1 already in the case of a single oscillating extended impurity, in contrast to the case of a pointlike impurity, where this phenomenon occurs only for 0<g<1∕20<g<1∕20<g<1∕2.
We generalize the bosonization methods for systems in the half line that we discussed elsewhere, to study the effects of interactions on electronic systems coupled to impurities. We introduce a model for a quantum wire coupled with a quantum dot by a purely capacitive interaction. We show that the effect on the quantum wire is a dynamical boundary condition which reflects the charge fluctuations of the quantum dot. Special attention is given to the role of the fermion boundary conditions and their interplay with the electron interactions on the bosonized effective theory.