We investigate the effect due to background impurities embedded in the region of two-dimensional electron gases to the magnetotransport. These impurities are achieved by homogeneously incorporating Si atoms in single quantum wells of high quality GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures. Several materials were grown this way with different densities of Si atoms. At low temperature the mobility decreases monotonically with increasing impurity density. In materials with incorporated impurities, effects are observed with increasing temperatures. On the one hand, a minimum in mobility appears, marking a transition between scattering enhancement due to acoustic phonon and mobility enhancement due to impurity driven conductivity. The temperature at which the transition takes place decreases with increasing impurity density. On the other hand, the incorporated impurities induce a non-monotonic temperature dependence of the electron density. The magnitude of this variation rises with increasing impurity density. The theory of electron-electron interaction correction to the conductivity alone fails to explain our results.
The effect of impurities situated at different distances from a two-dimensional electron gas on the density of states in a strong magnetic field is analyzed. Based on the exact result of Brezin, Gross, and Itzykson, we calculate the density of states in the whole energy range, assuming the Poisson distribution of impurities in the bulk. It is shown that in the case of small impurity concentration the density of states is qualitatively different from the model case when all impurities are located in the plane of the two-dimensional electron gas.
This paper discusses the influence of the channel impurity distribution on the transport and the drive current in short-gate MOSFET. In this purpose, a careful description of electron-ion interaction suitable for the case of discrete impurities has been implemented in a 3D particle Monte Carlo simulator. This transport model is applied to the investigation of 50 nm MOSFET operation. The results show that a small change in the number of doping impurities or in the position of a single discrete impurity in the inversion layer may significantly influence the drain current. This effect is not only…
We investigate the effects of charged impurity distributions and carrier-carrier interactions on electronic transport in graphene on SiO$_2$ by employing a self-consistent coupled simulation of carrier transport and electrodynamics. We show that impurity clusters of characteristic width 40--50 nm generate electron--hole puddles of experimentally observed sizes. In the conductivity versus carrier density dependence, the residual conductivity and the linear-region slope are determined by the impurity distribution, and the measured slope can be used to estimate the impurity density in experiment.…
Transport and gain properties of a resonant-phonon terahertz quantum cascade laser are calculated using nonequilibrium Green's functions. Impurity scattering is shown to be responsible for contrasting nonlinear effects in the transport and the gain properties. For typical doping concentrations, the current density is found to be weakly sensitive to the impurity scattering strength. In contrast, the calculated gain is found to be very sensitive to the impurity scattering strength. This difference is attributed to the strong momentum dependence of the long-range coupling to charged impurities. S…
Electron transport in a two-terminal Aharonov-Bohm ring with a few short-range scatterers is investigated. An analytical expression for the conductance as a function of the electron Fermi energy and magnetic flux is obtained using the zero-range potential theory. The dependence of the conductance on positions of scatterers is studied. We have found that the conductance exhibits asymmetric Fano resonances at certain energies. The dependence of the Fano resonances on magnetic field and positions of impurities is investigated. It is found that collapse of the Fano resonances occurs and discrete e…
We theoretically study the transport properties of both monolayer and bilayer graphene in the presence of electron-hole puddles induced by charged impurities which are invariably present in the graphene environment. We calculate the graphene conductivity by taking into account the non-mean-field two-component nature of transport in the highly inhomogeneous density and potential landscape, where activated transport across the potential fluctuations in the puddle regimes coexists with regular metallic diffusive transport. The existence of puddles allows the local activation at low carrier densit…
We theoretically study the atomic structure and energetics of silicon and silicon-nitrogen impurities in graphene. Using density-functional theory, we get insight into the atomic structures of the impurities, evaluate their formation energies and assess their abundance in realistic samples. We find that nitrogen, as well as oxygen and hydrogen, are trapped at silicon impurities, considerably altering the electronic properties of the system. Furthermore, we show that nitrogen doping can induce local magnetic moments resulting in spin-dependent transport properties, even though neither silicon n…
We study the transport properties of two dimensional electron systems with strong Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC) doped with interacting magnetic impurities. Interactions between magnetic impurities cause the formation of magnetic clusters with temperature dependent mean sizes (CMSs) distributed randomly on the surface of the system. Treating magnetic clusters as scattering centers, by employing a generalized relaxation time approximation we obtain the non-equilibrium distribution functions of Rashba electrons in both regimes of above and below the band-crossing point (BCP) and present the ex…
We investigate the ballistic electron transport in a monolayer graphene with configurational averaged impurities, located between two clean graphene leads. It is shown that the electron transmission are strongly dependent on the concentration of impurities and the incident energy. In turn, the conductance computed using the Landauer formalism shows a similar behavior to those found in experimental works as a function of the applied voltage for different concentrations of impurities in the limit of low temperatures. In the limit of zero bias voltage, the conductance shows a minimum value which …
In the present review we make a comprehensive analysis of our understanding on electron transport in mesoscopic single-channel rings and multi-channel cylinders within a tight-binding framework. A spectacular mesoscopic phenomenon where a non-decaying current circulates in a small conducting loop is observed upon the application of an Aharonov-Bohm flux $ϕ$. To understand its behavior one has to focus attention on the interplay of quantum phase coherence, electron-electron correlation and disorder. This is a highly challenging problem and here we address it for some simple loop geometries with…
We investigate transport through a single-level quantum dot coupled to noncollinearly magnetized ferromagnets in the presence of localized spins in either the tunnel barrier or on the quantum dot. For a spin embedded in the tunnel barrier, we find an interplay between current-induced switching of the spin, spin-dependent tunneling through the barrier and spin accumulation on the dot resulting in characteristic signals in the current. We, furthermore, find huge Fano factors due to random telegraph noise. For noncollinear geometries, an exchange field that depends on the impurity spin state lead…
We study both monolayer and bilayer graphene transport properties taking into account the presence of correlations in the spatial distribution of charged impurities. In particular we find that the experimentally observed sublinear scaling of the graphene conductivity can be naturally explained as arising from impurity correlation effects in the Coulomb disorder, with no need to assume the presence of short-range scattering centers in addition to charged impurities. We find that also in bilayer graphene correlations among impurities induce a crossover of the scaling of the conductivity at highe…
The electron transport through the parabolic quantum wire placed in longitudinal magnetic field in the presence of the system of short-range impurities inside the wire is investigated. Using approach based on the zero-range potential theory we obtained an exact formula for the transmission coefficient of the electron through the wire that allows to calculate such the transport characteristics as the conductance and differential thermopower. The dependencies of conductance and thermopower on the chemical potential and magnetic field are investigated. The effect of elastic scattering due to shor…
The electronic properties of antimonene, single-layer Sb, are attracting great attention. In this paper, spin transport in armchair antimonene nanoribbon (ASbNR) is investigated. Following the tight-binding model, we calculate both the transmission probability and the conductance by means of the non-equilibrium Green's function (NEGF) method. The effects of an external electric field vertical to the ribbon plane are explored. Our results indicate that the spin-flip rate increases with the vertical electric field. Disorder effects on spin transport are addressed by considering the presence of c…
The impurity-related electron transport through a double quantum dot (QD) Aharonov-Bohm (AB) interferometer is theoretically studied, by considering impurities coupled to the QDs in the interferometer arms. When investigating the linear conductance spectra \emph{vs} the impurity levels, we show that the impurities influence the electron transport in a nontrivial way, since their suppressing or enhancing the electron tunneling. A presented single-level impurity leads to the appearance of Fano lineshapes in the conductance spectra in the absence of magnetic flux, with the positions of Fano antir…
We examine the effects of long-range interactions in a quantum wire with two impurities. We employ the bosonization technique and derive an effective action for the system. The effect of the long-range interaction on the charging energy and spectral properties of the island formed by the impurities and the linear transport is discussed.
One of the remarkable features of disordered d-wave superconductors is strong sensitivity of long range properties to the microscopic realization of the disorder potential. Particularly rich phenomenology is observed for the -- experimentally relevant -- case of dilute distributions of isolated impurity centers. Building on earlier diagrammatic analyses, the present paper derives and analyses a low energy effective field theory of this system. Specifically, the results of previous diagrammatic T-matrix approaches are extended into the perturbatively inaccessible low energy regimes, and the lon…
We re-examine the quantum tau_q and transport tau_t scattering lifetimes due to background impurities in two-dimensional systems. We show that the well-known logarithmic divergence in the quantum lifetime is due to the non-physical assumption of an infinitely thick heterostructure, and demonstrate that the existing non-divergent multiple scattering theory can lead to unphysical quantum scattering lifetimes in high quality heterostructures. We derive a non-divergent scattering lifetime for finite thickness structures, which can be used both with lowest order perturbation theory and the multiple…
We consider a two-dimensional electron gas in the presence of Rashba spin-orbit coupling, and study the effects of magnetic s-wave impurities and long-range non-magnetic disorder on the spin-charge dynamics of the system. We focus on voltage induced spin polarizations and their relation to spin Hall currents. Our results are obtained using the quasiclassical Green function technique, and hold in the full range of the disorder parameter $αp_Fτ$.
Explicit dependencies of the local density of states and the magnetization local density of states have been obtained around magnetic point defects in a two-dimensional electron gas with Rashba spin-orbit interaction . The expressions are given in the Born approximation for arbitrary magnitude and orientation of the defect magnetic moment, and for arbitrary size of the constant of spin-orbit interaction alpha/. On the basis of our asymptotically exact formulas a procedure for the determination of the constant alpha/ in STM experiments is proposed. The novel analytical results are compared with…
We study the density of states of two-dimensional electron gas in magnetic field with scattering on point-like impurities that are uniformly distributed along the sample. We show that the electron-impurity interaction completely lifts the degeneracy of the Landau levels even at low impurity concentration. This statement is in contradiction with the previous results obtained in the unphysical approximation of two-dimensional impurities. There is a large region of the electron energy $ω$, counted from the Landau level, where the density of states $ρ(ω)$ is inversely proportional to $|ω|$ and pro…
The tunnel current of a Luttinger liquid with a finite density of strong impurities is calculated using an instanton approach. For very low temperatures $T$ or electric fields $E$ the (nonlinear) conductivity is of variable range hopping (VRH) type as for weak pinning. For higher temperatures or fields the conductivity shows power law behavior corresponding to a crossover from multi- to single-impurity tunneling. For even higher $T$ and not too strong pinning there is a second crossover to weak pinning. The determination of the position of the various crossover lines both for strong and weak p…
We analyze the electronic transport through a quantum dot that contains a magnetic impurity. The coherent transport of electrons is governed by the quantum confinement inside the dot, but is also influenced by the exchange interaction with the impurity. The interplay between the two gives raise to the singlet-triplet splitting of the energy levels available for the tunneling electron. In this paper, we focus on the charge fluctuations and, more precisely, the height of the conductance peaks. We show that the conductance peaks corresponding to the triplet levels are three times higher than thos…
We drive a quantum kinetic equation under discrete impurities for the Wigner function from the quantum Liouville equation. To attain this goal, the electrostatic Coulomb potential is separated into the long- and short-range parts, and the self-consistent coupling with Poisson's equation is explicitly taken into account. It is shown that the collision integral associated with impurity scattering as well as the usual drift term is derived on an equal footing and that the conventional treatment of impurity scattering under the Wigner function scheme is inconsistent in the sense that the collision…
We investigate nonperturbatively the effect of a magnetic dopant impurity on the edge transport of a quantum spin Hall (QSH) insulator. We show that for a strongly coupled magnetic dopant located near the edge of a system, a pair of transmission anti-resonances appear. When the chemical potential is on resonance, interaction effects broaden the anti-resonance width with decreasing temperature, thus suppressing transport for both repulsive and moderately attractive interactions. Consequences for the recently observed QSH insulating phase of the $1$-T$^{\prime}$ of WTe$_2$ are briefly discussed.
We review the physics of charged impurities in the vicinity of graphene. The long-range nature of Coulomb impurities affects both the nature of the ground state density profile as well as graphene's transport properties. We discuss the screening of a single Coulomb impurity and the ensemble averaged density profile of graphene in the presence of many randomly distributed impurities. Finally, we discuss graphene's transport properties due to scattering off charged impurities both at low and high carrier density.
The temperature dependence of Coulomb blockade peaks of a one dimensional quantum dot is calculated. The Coulomb interaction is treated microscopically using the Luttinger liquid model. The electron interaction is assumed to be non-homogeneous with a maximum strength near the quantum dot. The conductance peaks show non-analytic power law behaviour induced by the interaction. It is shown that there is a crossover in the power law which is related to the inhomogeneity of the interaction.
The outstanding transport properties expected at the edge of two-dimensional time-reversal invariant topological insulators have proven to be challenging to realize experimentally, and have so far only been demonstrated in very short devices. In search for an explanation to this puzzling observation, we here report a full first-principles calculation of topologically protected transport at the edge of novel quantum spin Hall insulators - specifically, Bismuth and Antimony halides - based on the non-equilibrium Green's functions formalism. Our calculations unravel two different scattering mecha…
Detailed experimental and theoretical studies of the temperature dependence of the effect of different scattering mechanisms on electrical transport properties of graphene devices are presented. We find that for high mobility devices the transport properties are mainly governed by completely screened short range impurity scattering. On the other hand, for the low mobility devices transport properties are determined by both types of scattering potentials - long range due to ionized impurities and short range due to completely screened charged impurities. The results could be explained in the fr…
We study the quantum corrections to the conductivity of the two-dimensional disordered interacting electron system in the diffusive regime due to inelastic scattering off rare magnetic impurities. We focus on the case of very different g-factors for electrons and magnetic impurities. Within the Born approximation for the inelastic scattering off magnetic impurities we find additional temperature-dependent corrections to the conductivity of the Altshuler-Aronov type. Our results demonstrate that the low temperature transport in interacting disordered electron systems with rare magnetic impuriti…
Ballistic transport of helical edge modes in two-dimensional topological insulators is protected by time-reversal symmetry. Recently it was pointed out [1] that coupling of non-interacting helical electrons to an array of randomly anisotropic Kondo impurities can lead to a spontaneous breaking of the symmetry and, thus, can remove this protection. We have analyzed effects of the interaction between the electrons using a combination of the functional and the Abelian bosonization approaches. The suppression of the ballistic transport turns out to be robust in a broad range of the interaction str…
We demonstrate theoretically that most of the observed transport properties of graphene sheets at zero magnetic field can be explained by scattering from charged impurities. We find that, contrary to common perception, these properties are not universal but depend on the concentration of charged impurities $n_{\rm imp}$. For dirty samples ($250 \times 10^{10} {\rm cm}^{-2} < n_{\rm imp} < 400 \times 10^{10} {\rm cm}^{-2}$), the value of the minimum conductivity at low carrier density is indeed $4 e^2/h$ in agreement with early experiments, with weak dependence on impurity concentration. For cl…
Charge transport in topological insulators is primarily characterised by so-called topologically projected helical edge states, where charge carriers are correlated in spin and momentum. In principle, dissipation-less current can be carried by these edge states as backscattering from impurities and defects is suppressed as long as time-reversal symmetry is not broken. However, applied magnetic fields or underlying nuclear spin-defects in the substrate can break this time reversal symmetry. In particular, magnetic impurities lead to back-scattering by spin-flip processes. We have investigated t…
In this work, electrical and spin properties of armchair silicene nanoribbon (ASiNR) in the presence of charged impurity is studied. The non-equilibrium Green's function along with multi-orbital tight-binding is applied to obtain transmission probability. different type of spin transmission probability in the ASiNR on a substrate is investigated. The charged impurities are located in the underlying substrate. Spin-flip along the channel is calculated by using spin transmission probability. Spin diffusion length in ASiNR for differently charged impurities is obtained and compared with the mean …
We study steady-state charge transfer across an interacting resonance-level model connected asymmetrically to two leads. For a linear energy dispersion relation of the leads, we calculate current-voltage characteristics of the model exactly employing the scattering Bethe-Ansatz of Mehta-Andrei and find symmetric transport showing the absence of diode effect. Next we study a lattice version of this model with a nonlinear dispersion for the leads using the Lippmann-Schwinger scattering theory. We find that the inclusion of nonlinearity in the leads' dispersion causes rectification for asymmetric…
Electronic transport properties of the disordered quantum wires are considered. The disorder is introduced via impurities (point scatterers), distributed uniformly over the two-dimensional strip, which represents a model quantum wire. Incident electrons with a given energy are scattered on impurities and boundaries of the wire. The electron-electron interaction is neglected in the model. In particular, the intermediate regime and the localization regime of transport are studied in more detail in terms of the conductance and statistical properties of S-matrix ensemble for a given incident elect…
Motivated by potential applications in spintronics, we study frequency dependent spin transport in nonitinerant one-dimensional spin chains. We propose a system that behaves as a capacitor for the spin degree of freedom. It consists of a spin chain with two impurities a distance $d$ apart. We find that at low energy (frequency) the impurities flow to strong coupling, thereby effectively cutting the chain into three parts, with the middle island containing a discrete number of spin excitations. At finite frequency spin transport through the system increases. We find a strong dependence of the f…
Helical edge states of two-dimensional topological insulators show a gap in the density of states (DOS) and suppressed conductance in the presence of ordered magnetic impurities. Here we will consider the dynamical effects on the DOS and transmission when the magnetic impurities are driven periodically. Using the Floquet formalism and Green's functions, the system properties are studied as a function of the driving frequency and the potential energy contribution of the impurities. We see that increasing the potential part closes the DOS gap for all driving regimes. The transmission gap is also…
A significant advance toward achieving practical applications of graphene as a two-dimensional material in nanoelectronics would be provided by successful synthesis of both n-type and p-type doped graphene. However reliable doping and a thorough understanding of carrier transport in the presence of charged impurities governed by ionized donors or acceptors in the graphene lattice are still lacking. Here we report experimental realization of few-layer nitrogen-doped (N-doped) graphene sheets by chemical vapor deposition of organic molecule 1, 3, 5-triazine on Cu metal catalyst. By reducing the …
A few exactly solvable interacting quantum many-body problems with impurities were previously reported to exhibit unusual features such as non-localization and absence of backscattering. In this work we consider the use of these integrable impurities as boundary conditions in the framework of linear transport problems. We first show that such impurities enhance the density of states at the Fermi surface, thus increasing the effective system size. The study of the real time-dynamics of a wave packet sent through a series of them inserted in both non-interacting and interacting leads then indica…
Localized magnetic moments have been predicted to develop in graphene samples with vacancies or adsorbates. The interplay between such magnetic impurities and graphene's Dirac quasiparticles leads to remarkable many-body phenomena, which have so far proved elusive to experimental efforts. In this article, we study the thermodynamic, spectral and transport signatures of quantum criticality and Kondo physics of a dilute ensemble of atomic impurities in graphene. We consider vacancies and adatoms that either break or preserve graphene's $C_{3v}$ and inversion symmetries. In a neutral graphene sam…
We consider iron impurities in the noble metals gold and silver and compare experimental data for the resistivity and decoherence rate to numerical renormalization group results. By exploiting non-Abelian symmetries we show improved numerical data for both quantities as compared to previous calculations [Costi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 056802 (2009)], using the discarded weight as criterion to reliably judge the quality of convergence of the numerical data. In addition we also carry out finite-temperature calculations for the magnetoresistivity of fully screened Kondo models with S = 1/2, …
The Kubo formula is used to calculate the spin-Hall conductivity in a spin-polarized two-dimensional electron system with Rashba-type spin-orbit interaction. As in the case of the unpolarized electron system, spin Hall conductivity is entirely determined by states at the Fermi level, a property that persists in the presence of magnetic impurities. In the clean limit, the spin-Hall conductivity decreases monotonically with the Zeeman splitting, a result of the ordering effect on the electron spins produced by the magnetic field. In the presence of magnetic impurities, the spin-dependent scatter…
We study the transport properties of a quantum wire, described by the Tomonaga-Luttinger model, in the presence of a backscattering potential provided by several extended time-dependent impurities (barriers). Employing the B\" uttiker-Landauer approach, we first consider the scattering of noninteracting electrons ($g=1$) by a rectangular-like barrier and find an exact solution for the backscattering current, as well as a perturbative solution for a weak static potential with an arbitrary shape. We then include electron-electron interactions and use the Keldysh formalism combined with the boson…
Dynamical magnetic impurities (MI) are considered as a possible origin for suppression of the ballistic helical transport on edges of 2D topological insulators. The MIs provide a spin-flip backscattering of itinerant helical electrons. Such a backscattering reduces the ballistic conductance if the exchange interaction between the MI and the electrons is anisotropic and the Kondo screening is unimportant. It is well-known that the isotropic MIs do not suppress the helical transport in systems with axial spin symmetry of the electrons. We show that, if this symmetry is broken, the isotropic MI a…
Local magnetic impurities arising from atomic vacancies in two-dimensional (2D) nanosheets are predicted to have a profound effect on charge transport due to resonant scattering, and provide a handle for enhancing thermoelectric properties through the Kondo effect. However, the effects of these impurities are often masked by external fluctuations and turbostratic interfaces, therefore, it is highly challenging to probe the correlation between magnetic impurities and thermoelectric parameters experimentally. In this work, we demonstrate that by placing Molybdenum Disulfide on a hexagonal Boron …
In this work we analyze the nonequilibrium transport through a quantum impurity (quantum dot or molecule) attached to ferromagnetic leads by using a hybrid numerical renormalization group-time-dependent density matrix renormalization group thermofield quench approach.For this, we study the bias dependence of the differential conductance through the system, which shows a finite zero-bias peak, characteristic of the Kondo resonance and reminiscent of the equilibrium local density of states. In the non-equilibrium settings, the resonance in the differential conductance is also found to decrease w…
Electron transfer (ET) across molecular chains including an impurity is studied based on a recently improved real-time path integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) approach [J. Chem. Phys. {\bf 121}, 12696 (2004)]. The reduced electronic dynamics is studied for various bridge lengths and defect site energies. By determining intersite hopping rates from PIMC simulations up to moderate times, the relaxation process in the extreme long time limit is captured within a sequential transfer model. The total transfer rate is extracted and shown to be enhanced for certain defect site energies. Further, it is revea…
We study the problem of underscreened Kondo physics in an interacting electronic system modeled by a Luttiger Liquid (LL). We find that the leading temperature dependence of thermodynamical quantities like the specific heat, spin susceptibility are Fermi Liquid like in nature. However, anomalous power law exponents are seen in the subleading terms. We also discuss possible realizations through single and double quantum dot configurations coupled to LL leads and its consequences for electronic transport. The leading low temperature transport behavior is seen to exhibit in general, non Fermi liq…
We study transport in a Weyl semimetal with donor and acceptor impurities. At sufficiently high temperatures transport is dominated by electron-electron interactions, while the low-temperature resistivity comes from the scattering of quasiparticles on screened impurities. Using the diagrammatic technique, we calculate the conductivity $σ(T,ω,n_A,n_D)$ in the impurities-dominated regime as a function of temperature $T$, frequency $ω$, and the concentrations $n_A$ and $n_D$ of donors and acceptors and discuss the crossover behaviour between the regimes of low and high temperatures and impurity c…
We consider transport of dilute two-dimensional electrons, with temperature between Fermi and Debye temperatures. In this regime, electrons form a nondegenerate plasma with mobility limited by potential disorder. Different kinds of impurities contribute unique signatures to the resulting temperature-dependent Drude conductivity, via energy-dependent scattering. This opens up a way to characterize sample disorder composition. In particular, neutral impurities cause a slow decrease in conductivity with temperature, whereas charged impurities result in conductivity growing as a square root of tem…
In the three-dimensional topological insulator (TI), the physics of doped semiconductors exists literally side-by-side with the physics of ultra-relativistic Dirac fermions. This unusual pairing creates a novel playground for studying the interplay between disorder and electronic transport. In this mini-review we focus on the disorder caused by the three-dimensionally distributed charged impurities that are ubiquitous in TIs, and we outline the effects it has on both the bulk and surface transport in TIs. We present self-consistent theories for Coulomb screening both in the bulk and at the sur…
We study the impact of dynamical correlations on the electronic structure and coherent transport properties of Cu nanocontacts hosting a single magnetic impurity (Ni,Co,Fe) in the contact region. The strong dynamical correlations of the impurity 3d-electrons are fully taken into account by combining density functional calculations with a dynamical treatment of the impurity 3d-shell in the one-crossing approximation. We find that dynamical correlations give rise to the Kondo effect and lead to Fano features in the coherent transport characteristics similar to those observed in related experimen…
