Quantum impurity problems in Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids (TLLs) are reviewed with emphasis on their analogy to the Kondo problem in Fermi liquids. First, the problem of a static impurity in a spinless TLL is considered, which is related to the model studied in the context of the macroscopic quantum coherence. In the low-energy limit the TLL is essentially cut into two pieces when interaction is repulsive. The orthogonality catastrophe in a TLL is then discussed. Finally, the Kondo effect of a spin-1/2 impurity in a one-dimensional repulsively interacting electron liquids (a spinful TLL) is reviewed. Regardless of the sign of the exchange coupling, the impury spin is completely screened in the ground state. The leading low-temperature contributions to thermodynamic quantities come from boundary contributions of a bulk leading irrelevant operator.
In this thesis, we calculate the linear dc conductance of two types of multi-terminal interacting systems: junctions of interacting quantum wires attached to Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL) leads, and closed and open long Aharonov-Bohm-Kondo (ABK) rings. In both cases, we obtain corrections to the non-interacting Landauer formula, arising from interactions in the TLL leads and the quantum dot in the Kondo regime respectively. In junctions of interacting quantum wires, if the wires are attached to Fermi liquid (FL) leads, the conductance is formally given by the Landauer formula with renormalized single-particle S-matrix elements. If, however, the wires are attached to TLL leads, i.e. the interaction does not vanish even in the leads, the conductance has an additional contribution dependent on the interaction strength in the leads. We calculate this additional contribution both at the first order in interaction and in the random phase approximation, and heuristically relate the FL conductance to the TLL conductance through a "contact resistance" between an FL lead and a TLL wire. In long ABK rings, where the interaction is due to spin-flip scattering at a quantum dot in the Kondo regime, the linear dc conductance consists of two parts: a disconnected part of the Landauer form, and a connected part that can be approximately eliminated at low temperatures. For a closed long ABK ring, where the electric current is conserved in the ring, the high-temperature conductance has qualitatively different behaviors for temperatures greater than and lower than the characteristic energy scale v_F /L, where v_F is the Fermi velocity and L is the ring circumference. Meanwhile, for an open long ABK ring where electrons may leak into the side leads coupled to ring arms, as long as the ring arms have both small transmission and small reflection, the ring behaves as a two-path Aharonov-Bohm interferometer, and we predict the observation of a π/2 phase shift due to scattering off the Kondo singlet formed at low energies around the impurity spin.