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Journal of Physics Condensed Matter

Thermally enhanced Wigner oscillations in two-electron 1D quantum dots

Fabio Cavaliere, Niccolò Traverso Ziani, Francesco Negro, Maura Sassetti

Published Nov 24, 2014• 11 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Motivated by a recent experiment (Pecker et al 2013 Nat. Phys. 9 576), we study the stability, with respect to thermal effects, of Friedel and Wigner density fluctuations for two electrons trapped in a one-dimensional quantum dot. Diagonalizing the system exactly, the finite-temperature average electron density is computed. While the weak and strong interaction regimes display a Friedel oscillation or a Wigner molecule state at zero temperature, which as expected smear and melt as the temperature increases, a peculiar thermal enhancement of Wigner correlations in the intermediate interaction regime is found. We demonstrate that this effect is due to the presence of two different characteristic temperature scales: T(F), dictating the smearing of Friedel oscillations, and T(W), smoothing Wigner oscillations. In the early Wigner molecule regime, for intermediate interactions, T(F) < T(W) leading to the enhancement of the visibility of Wigner oscillations. These results complement those obtained within the Luttinger liquid picture, valid for larger numbers of particles.

DOI
10.1088/0953-8984/26/50/505301

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Motivated by a recent experiment (Pecker et al 2013 Nat. Phys. 9 576), we study the stability, with respect to thermal effects, of Friedel and Wigner density fluctuations for two electrons trapped in a one-dimensional quantum dot. Diagonalizing the system exactly, the finite-temperature average electron density is computed. While the weak and strong interaction regimes display a Friedel oscillation or a Wigner molecule state at zero temperature, which as expected smear and melt as the temperature increases, a peculiar thermal enhancement of Wigner correlations in the intermediate interaction regime is found. We demonstrate that this effect is due to the presence of two different characteristic temperature scales: T(F), dictating the smearing of Friedel oscillations, and T(W), smoothing Wigner oscillations. In the early Wigner molecule regime, for intermediate interactions, T(F) < T(W) leading to the enhancement of the visibility of Wigner oscillations. These results complement those obtained within the Luttinger liquid picture, valid for larger numbers of particles.
The temperature-induced emergence of Wigner correlations over finite-size effects in a strongly interacting one-dimensional quantum dot is studied in the framework of the spin coherent Luttinger liquid. We demonstrate that, for temperatures comparable with the zero mode spin excitations, Friedel oscillations are suppressed by the thermal fluctuations of higher spin modes. On the other hand, the Wigner oscillations, sensitive to the charge mode only, are stable and become more visible. This behavior has been proved to be robust both in the thermal electron density and in the linear conductance in the presence of a scanning tunnel microscope tip. The latter probe is not directly proportional to the electron density and may confirm the above phenomena with complementary and additional information.
Thermal effects on the total charge density are studied for a one-dimensional correlated quantum dot by means of the path integral Monte Carlo method. The competition between Friedel and Wigner oscillations at zero temperature is driven by the ratio between the interaction of electronic strength and the kinetic energy of electrons. At the onset of the formation of a Wigner molecule, we show that thermal enhancement of Wigner oscillations occurs in a range of temperatures, which can be observed in the electron density. We further show that low-temperature Friedel oscillations may change to Wigner oscillations upon an increase in the temperature.
We consider the temperature-induced melting of a Wigner solid in one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) lattices of electrons interacting via the long-range Coulomb interaction in the presence of strong disorder arising from charged impurities in the system. The system simulates semiconductor-based 2D electron layers where Wigner crystallization is often claimed to be observed experimentally. Using exact diagonalization and utilizing the inverse participation ratio as well as conductance to distinguish between the localized insulating solid phase and the extended metallic liquid phase, we find that the effective melting temperature may be strongly enhanced by disorder since the disordered crystal typically could be in a localized glassy state incorporating the combined nonperturbative physics of both Anderson localization and Wigner crystallization. This disorder-induced enhancement of the melting temperature may explain why experiments often manage to observe insulating disorder-pinned Wigner solids in spite of the experimental temperature being decisively far above the theoretical melting temperature of the pristine Wigner crystal phase in many cases.
We study the density disturbance of a correlated 1D electron liquid in the presence of a scatterer or a barrier. The 2k_F-periodic density profile away from the barrier (Friedel oscillation) is computed for arbitrary electron--electron interaction and arbitrary impurity strength. We find that in presence of correlations, the Friedel oscillation decays slower than predicted by Fermi liquid theory. In the case of a spinless Luttinger liquid characterized by an interaction constant g<1, the asymptotic decay of the Friedel oscillation is x^-g. For a weak scatterer, the decay is even slower at small-to-intermediate distances from the impurity, with a crossover to the asymptotic x^-g law.
Many-fermion systems bound by hard walls display non-trivial density profiles characterized by so-called Friedel oscillations. In non-interacting systems, the characteristic scale of the oscillations is 2kF2 k^{}_F2kF​, where kFk^{}_FkF​ is the Fermi momentum, while repulsive interactions tend to generate Wigner-crystal oscillations at 4kF4 k^{}_F4kF​. We take a closer look at interacting systems in the presence of strong pairing correlations, such as those realized experimentally with ultracold atoms. We use ab initio lattice Monte Carlo methods to study the density profiles of few- to many-fermion systems in 1D, in the presence of hard-wall boundary conditions and attractive interactions. Additionally, we compute the ground-state energy and the momentum distribution.
The effects of a long-range electronic potential on a one-dimensional chain of spinless fermions are investigated by numerical techniques (exact diagonalization of rings with up to 30 sites complemented by finite size analysis) and analytic calculations. Due to a competition between the 2kF{2k}_{F}2kF​ oscillations in the density and the (very slow) log divergence of the long wavelength part of the Coulomb potential, the metallic character of the system is enhanced at intermediate (and up to quite large) length scales. Despite some similarities, we found that this quasimetallic regime is not of the Luttinger liquid type, as evidenced by strong deviations from predictions of conformal field theory and in agreement with the picture of a (very weakly pinned) Wigner crystal. When the strength of the Coulomb interaction is substantially increased, we observe a smooth crossover to a strongly localized charge density wave.