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arXiv:cond-mat/0104402 · Physical review. B, Condensed matter

Conductance through contact barriers of a finite-length quantum wire

Siddhartha Lal, Sumathi Rao, Diptiman Sen

Published Apr 22, 2002• 13 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We use the technique of bosonization to understand a variety of recent experimental results on the conductivity of a quantum wire. The quantum wire is taken to be a finite-length Luttinger liquid connected on two sides to semi-infinite Fermi liquids through contacts. The contacts are modeled as (short) Luttinger liquids bounded by localized one-body potentials. We use effective actions and the renormalization group to study the effects of electronic interactions within the wire, the length of the wire, finite temperature, and a magnetic field, on the conductivity. We explain the deviations of the conductivity from ${2Ne}^{2}/h$ in wires that are not too short as arising from renormalization effects caused by the repulsive interactions. We also explain the universal conductance corrections observed in different channels at higher temperatures. We study the effects of an external magnetic field on electronic transport through this system and explain why odd and even spin-split bands show different renormalizations from the universal conductance values. We discuss the case of resonant transmission and of the possibility of producing a spin valve that only allows electrons of one value of the spin to go through. We compare our results for the conductance corrections with experimental observations. We also propose an experimental test of our model of the contact regions.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.65.195304

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We use the technique of bosonization to understand a variety of recent experimental results on the conductivity of a quantum wire. The quantum wire is taken to be a finite-length Luttinger liquid connected on two sides to semi-infinite Fermi liquids through contacts. The contacts are modeled as (short) Luttinger liquids bounded by localized one-body potentials. We use effective actions and the renormalization group to study the effects of electronic interactions within the wire, the length of the wire, finite temperature, and a magnetic field, on the conductivity. We explain the deviations of the conductivity from 2Ne2/h{2Ne}^{2}/h2Ne2/h in wires that are not too short as arising from renormalization effects caused by the repulsive interactions. We also explain the universal conductance corrections observed in different channels at higher temperatures. We study the effects of an external magnetic field on electronic transport through this system and explain why odd and even spin-split bands show different renormalizations from the universal conductance values. We discuss the case of resonant transmission and of the possibility of producing a spin valve that only allows electrons of one value of the spin to go through. We compare our results for the conductance corrections with experimental observations. We also propose an experimental test of our model of the contact regions.
We study the electrical conductance in single-mode quantum wires with Rashba spin-orbit interaction subjected to externally applied magnetic fields in the regime in which the ratio of spin-orbit momentum to the Fermi momentum is close to an odd integer, so that a combined effect of multi-electron interaction and applied magnetic field leads to a partial gap in the spectrum. We study how this partial gap manifests itself in the temperature dependence of the fractional conductance of the quantum wire. We use two complementing techniques based on bosonization: refermionization of the model at a particular value of the interaction parameter and a semiclassical approach within a dilute soliton gas approximation of the functional integral. We show how the low-temperature fractional conductance can be affected by the finite length of the wire, by the properties of the contacts, and by a shift of the chemical potential, which takes the system away from the resonance condition. We also predict an internal resistivity caused by a dissipative coupling between gapped and gapless modes.
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We investigate transport through a finite interacting wire connected to noninteracting leads. The conductance of the pure wire is not renormalized by the interactions for any spatial variation of the interaction parameters u,Ku,Ku,K, and not even for Coulomb interactions restricted to the wire. We rigorously relate the conductance to the transmission, that turns out to be perfect. If KKK varies abruptly at the contacts, an electron incident on the wire is reflected into a series of partial spatially separated charges which sum up to unity. For attractive interactions, the reflection at the contact is similar to Andreev reflection on a gapless superconductor. This process affects the density-density or pairing correlation functions: they are enhanced on the bulk of the wire as in an infinite Luttinger liquid, then extend to the external noninteracting leads in a way reminiscent of the proximity effect. The effect of impurities is governed by the wire parameter but is affected by the leads close to the contacts. Our results give a possible explanation to recent experiments on quantum wires by Tarucha et al.
We investigate how the conductance GGG through a clean interacting quantum wire is affected by the presence of contacts and noninteracting leads. The contacts are defined by a vanishing two-particle interaction to the left and a finite repulsive interaction to the right or vice versa. No additional single-particle scattering terms (impurities) are added. We first use Bosonization and the local Luttinger liquid picture and show that within this approach GGG is determined by the properties of the leads regardless of the details of the spatial variation of the Luttinger liquid parameters. This generalizes earlier results obtained for steplike variations. In particular, no single-particle backscattering is generated at the contacts. We then study a microscopic model applying the functional renormalization group and show that the spatial variation of the interaction produces single-particle backscattering, which in turn leads to a reduced conductance. We investigate how the smoothness of the contacts affects GGG and show that for decreasing energy scale its deviation from the unitary limit follows a power law with the same exponent as obtained for a system with a weak single-particle impurity placed in the contact region of the interacting wire and the leads.
We use the nonequilibrium Green's function formalism and a self-consistent Hartree-Fock approximation to numerically study the effects of a single impurity and interactions between the electrons (with and without spin) on the conductance of a quantum wire. We study how the conductance varies with the wire length, the temperature, and the strengths of the impurity and interactions. The numerical results for the dependence of the conductance on the wire length and temperature are compared with the results obtained from a renormalization group analysis based on the Hartree-Fock approximation. For the spin-1∕21∕21∕2 model with a repulsive on-site interaction or the spinless model with an attractive nearest neighbor interaction, we find that the conductance increases with increasing wire length or decreasing temperature. This can be explained using the Born approximation in scattering theory. For a strong impurity, the conductance is significantly different for a repulsive and an attractive impurity; this is due to the existence of a bound state in the latter case. In general, the large density deviations close to the impurity have an appreciable effect on the conductance at short distances which is not captured by the renormalization group equations.
We discuss the conductance of quantum wires in terms of the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL) theory. We use explicitly the charge fractionalization scheme which results from the chiral symmetry of the model. We suggest that results of the standard two-terminal (2T) conductance measurement depend on the coupling of TLL with the reservoirs and can be interpreted as different boundary conditions at the interfaces. We propose a three-terminal (3T) geometry in which the third contact is connected weakly to the bulk of TLL subjected to a large bias current. We develop a renormalization-group (RG) analysis for this problem by taking explicitly into account the splitting of the injected electronic charge into two chiral irrational charges. We study in the presence of bulk contact the leading-order corrections to the conductance for two different boundary conditions, which reproduce in the absence of bulk contact, respectively, the standard 2T source-drain (SD) conductance GSD(2)=e2/h{G}_{\mathrm{SD}}^{(2)}{=e}^{2}/hGSD(2)​=e2/h and GSD(2)=ge2/h,{G}_{\mathrm{SD}}^{(2)}{=ge}^{2}/h,GSD(2)​=ge2/h, where g is the TLL charge interaction parameter. We find that under these two boundary conditions for the end contacts the 3T SD conductance GSD(3){G}_{\mathrm{SD}}^{(3)}GSD(3)​ shows an UV-relevant deviation from the above two values, suggesting new fixed points in the Ohmic limit. Nontrivial scaling exponents are predicted as a result of electron fractionalization.