A dc current can be pumped through an interacting system by periodically varying two independent parameters such as the magnetic field and a gate potential. We present a general expression for the adiabatic pumping current in interacting systems, written in terms of instantaneous properties of the system at equilibrium, and find the limits of its applicability. This expression generalizes the scattering approach for noninteracting particles. We apply our formula for a quantum critical system that exhibits the two-channel Kondo effect, where single particle excitations are not well defined. We find that if the quantum critical point is contained in the pumping trajectory, the pumped spin between the channels approaches h, and if it is not contained in the trajectory, the spin approaches zero when the temperature T --> 0. We discuss the non-Fermi liquid features of this system at finite T.
We study charge and spin transport through an interacting quantum wire, caused by backscattering of electrons off an effective impurity potential with a periodic time dependence. The adiabatic regime of this pump for charge and spin is shown to depend on the presence of interactions in the wire. For the noninteracting case, the transported quantities in a period are calculated and found to be adiabatic (independent of the pumping frequency) for all frequencies $\ensuremath{\Omega}\ensuremath{\ll}{v}_{F}/\mathcal{l},$ where
l is the range of the scattering potential and
vF is the Fermi velocity; this result is along the lines of adiabatic pumping in mesoscopic systems. On the other hand, we show that for a wire with repulsive electron-electron interactions, the adiabatic regime is confined to $\ensuremath{\Elzxh}\ensuremath{\Omega}\ensuremath{\ll}{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{\ensuremath{\Gamma}},$ where ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{\ensuremath{\Gamma}}$ is an energy scale set by the backscattering potential. Using symmetry and scaling properties of the quantum wire Hamiltonian, we relate the charge Q and spin S transported through the wire in a period $2\ensuremath{\pi}/\ensuremath{\Omega}$ to an integral involving quasistatic backscattering conductances. We also show that the pumped charge Q (or the spin
S) is quantized in the adiabatic limit if the conductance of the system is zero at the stable fixed point of the renormalization-group (RG) transformations. The quanta transported are given by the winding number of a complex coupling $\ensuremath{\Gamma}(\ensuremath{\Omega}t)$ as it traverses a closed path
C enclosing the origin $\ensuremath{\Gamma}=0.$ No adiabatic charge or spin is transported when the RG fixed point corresponds to a perfectly conducting wire, or if the path
C does not enclose the point $\ensuremath{\Gamma}=0.$ By contrast, for a RG marginal conductance---which is the case for noninteracting electrons---the charge transported in a cycle is not quantized, rather it is proportional to the area enclosed by the path or circuit
C, in agreement with previous studies of noninteracting mesoscopic systems. Finite size, temperature, and frequency effects on the transported quantities follow from the relation between adiabatic transport coefficients (backscattering conductances) and the quasistatic conductance of the system.
We calculate both the dc and the ac Josephson current through a one-dimensional system of interacting electrons, connected to two superconductors by tunnel junctions. We treat the (repulsive) Coulomb interaction in the framework of the one-channel, spin-1/2 Luttinger model. The Josephson current is obtained for two geometries of experimental relevance: a quantum wire and a ring. At zero temperature, the critical current is found to decay algebraically with increasing distance d between the junctions. The decay is characterized by an exponent which depends on the strength of the interaction. At finite temperatures T, lower than the superconducting transition temperature
Tc, there is a crossover from algebraic to exponential decay of the critical current as a function of d, at a distance of the order of \ensuremath{\Elzxh}
vF/
kBT. Moreover, the dependence of critical current on temperature shows nonmonotonic behavior. If the Luttinger liquid is confined to a ring of circumference L, coupled capacitively to a gate voltage and threaded by a magnetic flux, the Josephson current shows remarkable parity effects under the variation of these parameters. For some values of the gate voltage and applied flux, the ring acts as a \ensuremath{\pi} junction. These features are robust against thermal fluctuations up to temperatures on the order of \ensuremath{\Elzxh}
vF/
kBL. For the wire geometry, we have also studied the ac-Josephson effect. The amplitude and the phase of the time-dependent Josephson current are affected by electron-electron interactions. Specifically, the amplitude shows pronounced oscillations as a function of the bias voltage due to the difference between the velocities of spin and charge excitations in the Luttinger liquid. Therefore, the ac-Josephson effect can be used as a tool for the observation of spin-charge separation. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
We provide provide a detailed study of biasless coherent transport of singlet electron pairs in one-dimensional (1D) channels induced by electron-electron interactions that are time-varying in certain spatially localized regions of the channel. When the time variation is cyclic, the mechanism is analogous to the adiabatic quantum pumping of charge and spin previously studied. However, the presence of interactions that vary only in localized regions of space requires an intrinsically two-body description which is irreducible to the 1D single particle scattering matrix elements that are sufficient to describe quantum pumping of charge and spin. Here we derive a generalized theory for the pumping of such interacting pairs starting from first principles. We show that the standard description of charge pumping is contained within our more broadly applicable expressions. We then apply our general results to a concrete lattice model and obtain an exact analytical expression for the pumped singlet current. We further demonstrate that such a model can be implemented with a chain of currently available quantum dots with certain minor modifications that we suggest; we present a detailed numerical feasibility analysis of the characteristics of such experimentally realizable quantum dots, showing that the requirements for a measurable pumped singlet current are within experimental range.
We study finite-frequency transport properties of the double dot system recently constructed to observe the two-channel Kondo effect [R. M. Potok et al., Nature 446, 167 (2007)]. We derive an analytical expression for the frequency-dependent linear conductance of this device in the Kondo regime. We show how the features characteristic of the two-channel Kondo quantum critical point emerge in this quantity, which we compute using the results of conformal field theory as well as numerical renormalization group methods. We determine the universal crossover functions describing non-Fermi-liquid vs Fermi-liquid crossovers and also investigate the effects of a finite magnetic field.
We describe microscopic theory for the quantum transport through finite interacting systems connected to noninteracting leads. It can be applied to small systems such as quantum dots, quantum wires, atomic chain, molecule, and so forth. The Keldysh formalism is introduced to study the nonlinear current-voltage characteristics, and general properties of the nonequilibrium Green's functions are provided. We apply the formulated to an out-of-equilibrium Anderson model that has been used widely for the Kondo effect in quantum dots. In the linear-response regime the Kubo formalism still has an advantage, because it relates the transport coefficients directly to the correlation functions defined with respect to the thermal equilibrium, and it has no ambiguities about a profile of the inner electric field. We introduce a many-body transmission coefficient, by which the dc conductance can be expressed in a Landauer-type form, quite generally. We also discuss transport properties of the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid, which has also been an active field of research in this decade.
Over recent decades, a growing number of systems, many of them quantum critical, have been shown to exhibit non-Fermi-liquid behavior, but a full analytic understanding of such systems out of equilibrium is still lacking. In this paper, we provide a distinct example with broad applications in correlated mesoscopic systems to address this issue---a two-channel Kondo-Luttinger model where a Kondo impurity couples to two voltage-biased interacting electron leads, experimentally realizable in a dissipative quantum dot. Therein, an exotic quantum phase transition has been known to exist since the 1990s from the one-channel to two-channel Kondo ground states by enhancing electron interactions in the leads, but a controlled analytic approach to this quantum critical point has not yet been established due to the breakdown of weak-coupling perturbation theory near this strong-coupling critical point. We present a controlled method to this long-standing problem by mapping the system in the strong-coupling regime to an effective spin-boson-fermion Hamiltonian. Another type of non-Fermi-liquid quantum critical point is discovered with a distinct logarithmic-in-temperature and -voltage dependence in transport. We further obtain an analytical form for the universal differential conductance out of equilibrium near the transition. Our approach can be further generalized to study nonequilibrium physics of other strong-coupling low-dimensional non-Fermi-liquid fixed points. The relevance of our results for recent experiments is discussed.