We study the effect of electron-electron interactions on the transport in an inhomogeneous quantum wire. We show that contrary to the well-known Luttinger liquid result, non-uniform interactions contribute substantially to the resistance of the wire. In the regime of weakly interacting electrons and moderately low temperatures we find a linear in T resistivity induced by the interactions. We then use the bosonization technique to generalize this result to the case of arbitrarily strong interactions.
We study electron and spin transport in interacting quantum wires contacted by noninteracting leads. We theoretically model the wire and junctions as an inhomogeneous chain where the parameters at the junction change on the scale of the lattice spacing. We study such systems analytically in the appropriate limits based on Luttinger liquid theory and compare the results to quantum Monte Carlo calculations of the conductances and local densities near the junction. We first consider an inhomogeneous spinless fermion model with a nearest-neighbor interaction and then generalize our results to a sp…
The interplay between electronic interactions and disorder is neglected in the conventional Boltzmann theory of transport, yet can play an essential role in determining the resistivity of unconventional metals. When quasiparticles are long-lived, one can account for these intertwined effects by solving spatially inhomogeneous Boltzmann equations. Assuming smooth disorder and neglecting umklapp scattering, we solve these inhomogeneous kinetic equations and compute the electrical resistivity across the ballistic-to-hydrodynamic transition. An important consequence of electron-electron interactio…
Quantum and Boltzmann transport in the quasi-one-dimensional wire with rough edges
We study quantum transport in Q1D wires made of a 2D conductor of width W and length L>>W. Our aim is to compare an impurity-free wire with rough edges with a smooth wire with impurity disorder. We calculate the electron transmission through the wires by the scattering-matrix method, and we find the Landauer conductance for a large ensemble of disordered wires. We study the impurity-free wire whose edges have a roughness correlation length comparable with the Fermi wave length. The mean resistance <ρ> and inverse mean conductance 1/<g> are evaluated in dependence on L. For L -> 0 we observe th…
Interaction between electron and acoustic phonon in an in-plane magnetic field induced gapped quantum wire with Rashba spin-orbit interaction is studied. We calculate acoustic phonon limited resistivity ($ρ$) and phonon-drag thermopower ($S_g$) due to two well known mechanisms of electron-phonon interaction namely, deformation potential (DP) and piezoelectric (PE) scattering. In the so called Bloch-Gruneisen temperature limit both $ρ$ and $S_g$ depend on temperature ($T$) in a power law fashion i.e. $ρ$ or $S_g\sim T^{ν_T}$. For resistivity, $ν_T$ takes the value $5$ and $3$ due to DP and PE s…
We study the resistivity scaling in nanometer-sized metallic wires due to surface roughness and grain-boundaries, currently the main cause of electron scattering in nanoscaled interconnects. The resistivity has been obtained with the Boltzmann transport equation, adopting the relaxation time approximation (RTA) of the distribution function and the effective mass approximation for the conducting electrons. The relaxation times are calculated exactly, using Fermi's golden rule, resulting in a correct relaxation time for every sub-band state contributing to the transport. In general, the relaxati…
Micrometer width and nanometer thick wires with different shapes were produced $\approx 3~\upmu$m below the surface of a diamond crystal using a microbeam of He$^+$ ions with 1.8~MeV energy. Initial samples are amorphous and after annealing at $T\approx 1475$~K, the wires crystallized into a graphite-like structures, according to confocal Raman spectroscopy measurements. The electrical resistivity at room temperature is only one order of magnitude larger than the in-plane resistivity of highly oriented pyrolytic bulk graphite and shows a small resistivity ratio($ρ(2{\rm K})/ρ(315{\rm K}) \appr…
We present measurements of the dynamical response of thermal noise to an ac excitation in conductors at low temperature. From the frequency dependence of this response function - the noise thermal impedance - in the range 1 kHz-1 GHz we obtain direct determinations of the inelastic relaxation times relevant in metallic wires at low temperature: the electron-phonon scattering time and the diffusion time of electrons along the wires. Combining these results with that of resistivity provides a measurement of heat capacity of samples made of thin film. The simplicity and reliability of this techni…
We study interaction-induced backscattering in clean quantum wires with adiabatic contacts exposed to a voltage bias. Particle backscattering relaxes such systems to a fully equilibrated steady state only on length scales exponentially large in the ratio of bandwidth of excitations and temperature. Here we focus on shorter wires in which full equilibration is not accomplished. Signatures of relaxation then are due to backscattering of hole excitations close to the band bottom which perform a diffusive motion in momentum space while scattering from excitations at the Fermi level. This is remini…
We present the theory of quasiparticle transport in perturbatively small inhomogeneous magnetic fields across the ballistic-to-hydrodynamic crossover. In the hydrodynamic limit, the resistivity $ρ$ generically grows proportionally to the rate of momentum-conserving electron-electron collisions at large enough temperatures $T$. In particular, the resulting flow of electrons provides a simple scenario where viscous effects suppress conductance below the ballistic value. This new mechanism for $ρ\propto T^2$ resistivity in a Fermi liquid may describe low $T$ transport in single-band $\mathrm{SrTi…
我们在金线中测量了准粒子之间的能量交换率、准粒子的相位相干时间和电阻随温度的变化,以探讨低温下相关的相互作用过程。我们发现,能量交换率是高于预期的电子-电子相互作用的理论,它有一个不同的能量依赖性。失相时间在8 K ~ 0.5K之间是恒定的,低于0.5K时,失相时间增加。的磁阻是负的,在大的字段尺度,和电阻随温度的升高而降低,这表明磁性杂质的存在下,可能是Fe。而电阻率和相位相干测量可以归因于磁性杂质,提出的问题是,这些磁性杂质是否也可以调解准粒子之间的能量交换。
Carrier mean free path and temperature imbalance in mesoscopic wires
在电场作用下,金属纳米线中的非相干电子输运表现出不同的前向和后向非平衡态载流子温度。取决于表征分支间载流子后向散射的平均自由程,传输机制在弹道极限和扩散极限之间变化。特别是,我们表明,同时测量的电气特性和载波分布函数提供了一种直接的方法来提取载波平均自由程,即使它是可比的导体长度。我们的模型与Pothier { \it et al.}对铜纳米线的实验工作符合得很好。[Phys. Rev. Lett. { \bf 79},3490(1997)],并提供了对局部载流子分布函数中观察到的不均匀热加宽及其随外部偏置的缩放的优雅解释。
Broadening processes in GaAs delta-doped quantum wire superlattices
利用高磁场和低温下的量子Hall和Shubnikov de Haas实验,分析了δ掺杂二维量子阱超晶格和一维量子线超晶格中Landau能级的展宽过程.我们首先从两种超晶格在各种磁场组态下的Shubnikov de Haas曲线的阻尼因子和测量的电流来推断展宽的起源。然后,我们写出了量子霍尔效应中电阻率的一般公式,引入了与局域化过程相联系的失相因子。
The classical Hall effect, the traditional means of determining charge-carrier sign and density in a conductor, requires a magnetic field to produce transverse voltages across a current-carrying wire. We show that along curved paths -- $\mathrm{\textit{without}}$ any magnetic field -- geometry alone can produce nonlinear transverse potentials that reflect the charge-carrier sign and density. We demonstrate this effect in curved graphene wires where the transverse potentials are consistent with the doping and change polarity as we switch the carrier sign. In straight wires, we measure transvers…
We study the temperature dependence of the electrical conductance of a clean strongly interacting quantum wire in the presence of a helical nuclear spin order. The nuclear spin helix opens a temperature-dependent partial gap in the electron spectrum. Using a bosonization framework we describe the gapped electron modes by sine-Gordon-like kinks. We predict an internal resistivity caused by an Ohmic-like friction these kinks experience via interacting with gapless excitations. As a result, the conductance rises from $G=e^2/h$ at temperatures below the critical temperature when nuclear spins are …
We investigate the influence of the chemical potential mismatch $Δ$ (different electron densities) on Coulomb drag between two parallel ballistic quantum wires. For pair collisions, the drag resistivity $ρ_{\rm D}(Δ)$ shows a peculiar anomaly at $Δ=0$ with $ρ_{\rm D}$ being finite at $Δ=0$ and vanishing at any nonzero $Δ$. The "bodyless" resonance in $ρ_{\rm D}(Δ)$ at zero $Δ$ is only broadened by processes of multi-particle scattering. We analyze Coulomb drag for finite $Δ$ in the presence of both two- and three-particle scattering within the kinetic equation framework, focusing on a Fokker-P…
We study both noncentrosymmetric and time-reversal breaking Weyl semimetal systems under a strong magnetic field with the Coulomb interaction. The three-dimensional bulk system is reduced to many mutually interacting quasi-one-dimensional wires. Each strongly correlated wire can be approached within the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid formalism. Including impurity scatterings, we inspect the localization effect and the temperature dependence of the electrical resistivity. The effect of a large number of Weyl points in real materials is also discussed.
In a previous paper [J.-M. Bischoff and E. Jeckelmann, Phys. Rev. B 96, 195111 (2017)] we introduced a density-matrix renormalization group method for calculating the linear conductance of one-dimensional correlated quantum systems and demonstrated it on homogeneous spinless fermion chains with impurities. Here we present extensions of this method to inhomogeneous systems, models with phonons, and the spin conductance of electronic models. The method is applied to a spinless fermion wire-lead model, the homogeneous spinless Holstein model, and the Hubbard model. Its capabilities are demonstrat…
Confinement of electrons in graphene to make devices has proven to be a challenging task. Electrostatic methods fail because of Klein tunneling, while etching into nanoribbons requires extreme control of edge terminations, and bottom-up approaches are limited in size to a few nanometers. Fortunately, its mechanical flexibility raises the possibility of using strain to alter graphene's properties and create novel straintronic devices. Here, we report transport studies of nanowires created by linearly-shaped strained regions resulting from individual folds formed by layer transfer onto hexagonal…