Transport through a one-dimensional wire of interacting electrons connected to semi infinite leads is investigated using a bosonization approach. The dynamic nonlocal conductivity is rigorously expressed in terms of the transmission. For abrupt variations of the interaction parameters at the junctions, an incident electron is transmitted as a sequence of partial charges: the central wire acts as a Fabry-Perot resonator. The dc conductance is shown to be given by the total transmission which turns out to be perfect. When the wire has a tendency towards superconducting order, partial Andreev reflection of an incident electron occurs. Finally, we study the role of a weak barrier at one contact or inside the wire by a renormalization group method at finite temperature. We compute the conductance in the presence of localized or extended disorder, and compare our results to recent experiments on quantum wires.
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,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
K 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 a one-dimensional wire of interacting electrons connected to one-dimensional noninteracting leads in the absence and in the presence of a backscattering potential. The ballistic wire separates the charge and spin parts of an incident electron even in the noninteracting leads. The Fourier transform of nonlocal correlation functions is computed for $T\ensuremath{\gg}\ensuremath{\omega}$. In particular, this allows to study the proximity effect, related to the Andreev reflection. In addition, a new type of proximity effect emerges when the wire has normally a tendency towards Wigner crystal formation. The latter is suppressed by the leads below a space-dependent crossover temperature; it gets dominated everywhere by the
2kF charge-density wave at $T<{L}^{(3/2)(K\ensuremath{-}1)}$ for short-range interactions with parameter
K<1/3. The lowest-order renormalization equations of a weak backscattering potential are derived explicitly at finite temperature. A perturbative expression for the conductance in the presence of a potential with arbitrary spatial extension is given. It depends on the interactions, but is also affected by the noninteracting leads, especially for very repulsive interactions,
K<1/3. This leads to various regimes, depending on temperature and on
K. For randomly distributed weak impurities, the conductance fluctuations, equal to that of $\mathcal{R}=g\ensuremath{-}{2e}^{2}/h$, are computed. They depend on the interaction parameters, and are different for electrons with or without spin. But the ratio
Var(R)/R2 stays always of the same order: it is equal to ${L}_{T}/L\ensuremath{\ll}1$ in the high-temperature limit, then saturates at
1/2 in the low-temperature limit, indicating that the relative fluctuations of
R are universal.
Using the equation of motion, we investigate theoretically the dynamical ac conductance of a clean Luttinger-liquid quantum wire adiabatically coupled to Fermi liquid electron reservoirs in the presence of short-ranged electron-electron interactions. For a perfect single mode quantum wire, in the limit of zero-ranged interaction we conclude that the static dc conductance of ω→0 is e 2 / h , which is independent of the electron interactions. While in the dynamical case of ω≠0, the ac conductance oscillates with the amplitude e 2 / h and the period which depends on the interaction strength and the driving frequency as well as the position in the wire.
We investigate transport of spinless fermions through a single site dot junction of
M one-dimensional quantum wires. The semi-infinite wires are described by a tight-binding model. Each wire consists of two parts, the noninteracting leads and a region of finite extent in which the fermions interact via a nearest-neighbor interaction. The functional renormalization group method is used to determine the flow of the linear conductance as a function of a low-energy cutoff for a wide range of parameters. Several fixed points are identified and their stability is analyzed. We determine the scaling exponents governing the low-energy physics close to the fixed points. Some of our results can already be derived using the non-self-consistent Hartree-Fock approximation.
We study transport through a one-dimensional quantum wire of correlated fermions connected to semi-infinite leads. The wire contains either a single impurity or two barriers, the latter allowing for resonant tunneling. In the leads the fermions are assumed to be noninteracting. The wire is described by a microscopic lattice model. Using the functional renormalization group we calculate the linear conductance for wires of mesoscopic length and for all relevant temperature scales. For a single impurity, either strong or weak, we find power-law behavior as a function of temperature. In addition, we can describe the complete crossover from the weak- to the strong-impurity limit. For two barriers, depending on the parameters of the enclosed quantum dot, we find temperature regimes in which the conductance follows power laws with ``universal'' exponents as well as nonuniversal behavior. Our approach leads to a comprehensive picture of resonant tunneling. We compare our results with those of alternative approaches.