We reformulate the Tomonaga--Luttinger liquid theory for quasi-one-dimensional Fermion systems with many subbands across the Fermi energy. Our theory enables us to obtain a rigorous expression of the local density of states (LDOS) for general multichannel quantum wires, describing how the power-law anomalies of LDOS depend on inter- and intra-subbands couplings as well as the Fermi velocity of each band. The resulting formula for the exponents is valid in the case of both bulk contact and edge contact, and thus plays a fundamental role in the physical properties of multicomponent Tomonaga--Luttinger liquid systems.
Multimode spinless p-wave superconducting wires with a width W much smaller than the superconducting coherence length ξare known to have multiple low-energy subgap states localized near the wire's ends. Here we compare the typical energies of such endstates for various terminations of the wire: A superconducting wire coupled to a normal-metal stub, a weakly disordered superconductor wire and a wire with smooth confinement. Depending on the termination, we find that the energies of the subgap states can be higher or lower than for the case of a rectangular wire with hard-wall boundaries.
We present a theory for the van Hove singularity (VHS) in the tunneling density of states (TDOS) of disordered multichannel quantum wires, in particular multi-wall carbon nanotubes. We assume close-by gates which screen off electron-electron interactions. Diagrammatic perturbation theory within a non-crossing approximation yields analytical expressions governing the disorder-induced broadening and shift of VHS's as new subbands are opened. This problem is nontrivial because the (lowest-order) Born approximation breaks down close to the VHS. Interestingly, compared to the bulk case, the boundar…
An $N$-channel spinless p-wave superconducting wire is known to go through a series of $N$ topological phase transitions upon increasing the disorder strength. Here, we show that at each of those transitions the density of states shows a Dyson singularity $ν(\varepsilon) \propto \varepsilon^{-1}|\ln\varepsilon|^{-3} $, whereas $ν(\varepsilon) \propto \varepsilon^{|α|-1}$ has a power-law singularity for small energies $\varepsilon$ away from the critical points. Using the concept of "superuniversality" [Gruzberg, Read, and Vishveshwara, Phys. Rev. B 71, 245124 (2005)], we are able to relate the…
We investigate intersubband mixing effects in multichannel quantum wires in the presence of Rashba spin-orbit coupling and attached to two terminals. When the contacts are ferromagnetic and their magnetization direction is perpendicular to the Rashba field, the spin-transistor current is expected to depend in a oscillatory way on the Rashba coupling strength due to spin coherent oscillations of the travelling electrons. Nevertheless, we find that the presence of many propagating modes strongly influences the spin precession effect, leading to (i) a quenching of the oscillations and (ii) strong…
In this work, we investigate the effect of disorder on the topological properties of multichannel superconductor nanowires. While the standard expectation is that the spectral gap is closed and opened at transitions that change the topological index of the wire, we show that the closing and opening of a transport gap can also cause topological transitions, even in the presence of nonzero density of states across the transition. Such transport gaps induced by disorder can change the topological index, driving a topologically trivial wire into a nontrivial state or vice versa. We focus on the Ra…
We derive exact quantum expressions for the localization length $L_c$ for weak disorder in two- and three chain tight-binding systems coupled by random nearest-neighbour interchain hopping terms and including random energies of the atomic sites. These quasi-1D systems are the two- and three channel versions of Dorokhov's model of localization in a wire of $N$ periodically arranged atomic chains. We find that $L^{-1}_c=N.ξ^{-1}$ for the considered systems with $N=(1,2,3)$, where $ξ$ is Thouless' quantum expression for the inverse localization length in a single 1D Anderson chain, for weak disor…
The effect of mispair on charge transport in a DNA of sequence (GC)(TA)_N(GC)_3 connected to platinum electrodes is studied using the tight-binding model. With parameters derived from ab initio density functional result, we calculate the current versus bias voltage for DNA with and without mispair and for different numbers of (TA) basepairs N between the single and triple (GC) basepairs. The current decays exponentially with $N$ under low bias but reaches a minimum under high bias when a multichannel transport mechanism is established. A (GA) mispair substituting a (TA) basepair near the middl…
We study the conductance threshold of clean nearly straight quantum wires in the magnetic field. As a quantitative example we solve exactly the scattering problem for two-electrons in a wire with planar geometry and a weak bulge. From the scattering matrix we determine conductance via the Landauer-Buettiker formalism. The conductance anomalies found near 0.25(2e^2/h) and 0.75(2e^2/h) are related to a singlet resonance and a triplet resonance, respectively, and survive to temperatures of a few degrees. With increasing in-plane magnetic field the conductance exhibits a plateau at e^2/h, consiste…
Anomalies near the conductance threshold of nearly perfect semiconductor quantum wires are explained in terms of singlet and triplet resonances of conduction electrons with a single weakly-bound electron in the wire. This is shown to be a universal effect for a wide range of situations in which the effective single-electron confinement is weak. The robustness of this generic behavior is investigated numerically for a wide range of shapes and sizes of cylindrical wires with a bulge. The dependence on gate voltage, source-drain voltage and magnetic field is discussed within the framework of an e…
We study the conductance threshold of clean nearly straight quantum wires in which an electron is bound. We show that such a system exhibits spin-dependent conductance structures on the rising edge to the first conductance plateau, one near 0.25(2e^2/h), related to a singlet resonance, and one near 0.75(2e^2/h), related to a triplet resonance. As a quantitative example we solve exactly the scattering problem for two-electrons in a wire with circular cross-section and a weak bulge. From the scattering matrix we determine conductance via the Landauer-Buettiker formalism. The conductance anomalie…
The Dorokhov-Mello-Pereyra-Kumar (DMPK) equation, which describes the distribution of transmission eigenvalues of multichannel disordered conductors, has been enormously successful in describing a variety of detailed transport properties of mesoscopic wires. However, it is limited to the regime of quasi one dimension only. We derive a one parameter generalization of the DMPK equation, which should broaden the scope of the equation beyond the limit of quasi one dimension.
We show that the topologically trivial zero bias peak (ZBP) emerging in semiconductor Majorana wires due to soft confinement exhibits correlated splitting oscillations as a function of the applied Zeeman field, similar to the correlated splitting of the Majorana ZBP. Also, we find that the presence of a strong impurity can effectively cut the wire in two and destroy the correlated splitting in both the trivial and the Majorana regimes. We identify a strong nonlocal effect that operates only in the topologically trivial regime and demonstrate that the dependence of the ZBP on the confining gate…
An invariant ensemble of $N\times N$ random matrices can be characterised by a joint distribution for eigenvalues $P(λ_1,\cdots,λ_N)$. The study of the distribution of linear statistics, i.e. of quantities of the form $L=(1/N)\sum_if(λ_i)$ where $f(x)$ is a given function, appears in many physical problems. In the $N\to\infty$ limit, $L$ scales as $L\sim N^η$, where the scaling exponent $η$ depends on the ensemble and the function $f$. Its distribution can be written under the form $P_N(s=N^{-η}\,L)\simeq A_{β,N}(s)\,\exp\big\{-(βN^2/2)\,Φ(s)\big\}$, where $β\in\{1,\,2,\,4\}$ is the Dyson inde…
Over the last decade, interest in one-dimensional charge transport has progressed from the seminal discovery of Landauer quantization of conductance, as a function of carrier density, to finer-scale phenomena at the onset of quantization. This has come to be called the "0.7 anomaly", rather connoting a theoretical mystery of some profundity and universality, which remains open to date. Its somewhat imaginative appellation may tend to mislead, since the anomaly manifests itself over a range of conductance values: anywhere between 0.25 to 0.95 Landauer quanta. In this paper we offer a critique o…
We study anomalies in the Coulomb blockade spectrum of a quantum dot formed in a silicon nanowire. These anomalies are attributed to electrostatic interaction with charge traps in the device. A simple model reproduces these anomalies accurately and we show how the capacitance matrices of the traps can be obtained from the shape of the anomalies. From these capacitance matrices we deduce that the traps are located near or inside the wire. Based on the occurrence of the anomalies in wires with different doping levels we infer that most of the traps are arsenic dopant states. In some cases the an…
At a Fano resonance in a quantum wire there is strong quantum mechanical back-scattering. When identical wave packets are incident along all possible modes of incidence, each wave packet is strongly scattered. The scattered wave packets compensate each other in such a way that the outgoing wave packets are similar to the incoming wave packets. This is as if the wave packets are not scattered and not dispersed. This typically happens for the kink-antikink solution of the Sine-Gordon model. As a result of such non-dispersive behavior, the derivation of semi-classical formulas like the Friedel su…
The conductance threshold of a clean nearly straight quantum wire in which a single electron is bound is studied. This exhibits spin-dependent conductance anomalies on the rising edge to the first conductance plateau, near G=0.25(2e^{2}/h) and G=0.7(2e^{2}/h), related to a singlet and triplet resonances respectively. We show that the problem may be mapped on to an Anderson-type of Hamiltonian and calculate the energy dependence of the energy parameters in the resulting model.
A shallow potential well in a near-perfect quantum wire will bind a single-electron and behave like a quantum dot, giving rise to spin-dependent resonances of propagating electrons due to Coulomb repulsion and Pauli blocking. It is shown how this may be used to generate full entanglement between static and flying spin-qubits near resonance in a two-electron system via singlet or triplet spin-filtering. In a quantum wire with many electrons, the same pairwise scattering may be used to explain conductance, thermopower and shot-noise anomalies, provided the temperature/energy scale is sufficientl…
We investigate the low energy behavior of local density of states in metallic C$_{60}$ polymers theoretically. The multichannel bosonization method is applied to electronic band structures evaluated from first principles calculation, by which the effects of electronic correlation and nanoscale corrugation in the atomic configuration are fully taken into account. We obtain a closed-form expression for the power law anomalies in the local density of states, which successfully describes the experimental observation on the \fu polymers in a quantitative manner. An important implication from the cl…
By viewing current in the detecting lead of a spintronic device as being an ensemble of flowing spins corresponding to a mixed quantum state, where each spin itself is generally described by an improper mixture generated during the transport where it couples to other degrees of freedom due to spin-orbit (SO) interactions or inhomogeneous magnetic fields, we introduce the spin density operator associated with such current expressed in terms of the spin-resolved Landauer transmission matrix of the device. This formalism, which provides complete description of coupled spin-charge quantum transpor…
Thermoelectric transport coefficients are determined for semiconductor quantum wires with weak thickness fluctuations. Such systems exhibit anomalies in conductance near 1/4 and 3/4 of 2e^2/h on the rising edge to the first conductance plateau, explained by singlet and triplet resonances of conducting electrons with a single weakly bound electron in the wire [T. Rejec, A. Ramsak, and J.H. Jefferson, Phys. Rev. B 62, 12985 (2000)]. We extend this work to study the Seebeck thermopower coefficient and linear thermal conductance within the framework of the Landauer-Buettiker formalism, which also …
Short length quantum wires (quantum contacts) exhibit a conductance structure at the value of conductance close to 0.7 \times 2e^2/h. The structure is also called the conductance anomaly. In longer contacts the structure evolves to the lower values of conductance. We demonstrate that this structure is related to the development of charge density waves within the contact. This is a precursor for Wigner crystallization. Many-body Hartree-Fock calculations of conductance are performed. The results are in agreement with experimental data.
We analyze the recently measured anomalous transport properties of an ultracold gas through a ballistic constriction [S. Krinner et al., PNAS 201601812 (2016)]. The quantized conductance observed at weak interactions increases several-fold as the gas is made strongly interacting, which cannot be explained by the Landauer theory of single-channel transport. We show that this phenomenon is due to the multichannel Andreev reflections at the edges of the constriction, where the interaction and confinement result in a superconducting state. Andreev processes convert atoms of otherwise reflecting ch…
It has been suggested that a zero-bias conductance peak in quantum wires signifies the presence of Kondo spin-correlations, which might also relate to an intriguing 1D spin-effect known as the 0.7 structure. These zero-bias anomalies (ZBA) are strongly temperature dependent, and have been observed to split into two peaks in magnetic field, both signatures of Kondo correlations in quantum dots. We present data in which ZBAs in general do not split as magnetic field is increased up to 10 T. A few of our ZBAs split in magnetic field but by significantly less than the Kondo splitting value, and ev…
We generalize the scattering theory of quantum shot noise to include the full spin-density matrix of electrons injected from a spin-filtering or ferromagnetic electrode into a quantum-coherent nanostructure governed by various spin-dependent interactions. This formalism yields the spin-resolved shot noise power for different experimental measurement setups--with ferromagnetic source and ferromagnetic or normal drain electrodes--whose evaluation for the diffusive multichannel quantum wires with the Rashba (SO) spin-orbit coupling shows how spin decoherence and dephasing lead to substantial enha…
We study Andreev reflection in a ballistic one-dimensional channel coupled in parallel to a superconductor via a tunnel barrier of finite length $L$. The dependence of the low-energy Andreev reflection probability $R_A$ on $L$ reveals the existence of a characteristic length scale $ξ_N$ beyond which $R_A(L)$ is enhanced up to unity despite the low interfacial transparency. The Andreev reflection enhancement is due to the strong mixing of particle and hole states that builds up in contacts exceeding the coherence length $ξ_N$, leading to a small energy gap (minigap) in the density of states of …
We study nonlinear transport for two coupled one-dimensional quantum wires or carbon nanotubes described by Luttinger liquid theory. Transport properties are shown to crucially depend on the contact length $L_c$. For a special interaction strength, the problem can be solved analytically for arbitrary $L_c$. For point-like contacts and strong interactions, a qualitatively different picture compared to a Fermi liquid emerges, characterized by zero-bias anomalies and strong dependence on the applied cross voltage. In addition, pronounced Coulomb drag phenomena are important for extended contacts.
