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 of the 0.7 anomaly and discuss the extent to which it represents a deep question of physics.
Self-consistent modelling based on local spin-density formalism is employed to calculate conductance of quantum point contacts at finite temperatures. The total electrostatic potential exhibits spin-dependent splitting, which persists at temperatures up to 0.5 K and gives rise to the anomalies at 0.4 and 0.7 of the conductance quantum $2e^2/h$ occurring simultaneously in the absence of external magnetic fields.
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…
Low temperature transport measurements on a p-GaAs quantum point contact are presented which reveal the presence of a conductance anomaly that is markedly different from the conventional `0.7 anomaly'. A lateral shift by asymmetric gating of the conducting channel is utilized to identify and separate different conductance anomalies of local and generic origins experimentally. While the more generic 0.7 anomaly is not directly affected by changing the gate configuration, a model is proposed which attributes the additional conductance features to a gate-dependent coupling of the propagating stat…
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 conductance of a ballistic elliptically shaped quantum wire is investigated theoretically. It is shown that the effect of the curvature results in strong oscillating dependence of the conductance on the applied bias.
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 calculate the linear and nonlinear conductance of spinless fermions in clean, long quantum wires where short-ranged interactions lead locally to equilibration. Close to the quantum phase transition where the conductance jumps from zero to one conductance quantum, the conductance obtains an universal form governed by the ratios of temperature, bias voltage and gate voltage. Asymptotic analytic results are compared to solutions of a Boltzmann equation which includes the effects of three-particle scattering. Surprisingly, we find that for long wires the voltage predominantly drops close to one…
The electron transport through a monoatomic metallic wire connected to leads is investigated using the tight-binding Hamiltonian and Green's function technique. Analytical formulas for the transmittance are derived and M-atom oscillations of the conductance versus the length of the wire are found. Maxima of the transmittance function versus the energy, for the wire consisted of N atoms, determine the (N+1) period of the conductance. The periods of conductance oscillations are discussed and the local and average quantum wire charges are presented. The average charge of the wire is linked with t…
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.
The effect of exchange interaction on the two-terminal conductance of fully ballistic samples is studied using a many-particle wave packet formalism. The approach shows that the puzzling nonuniversal conductance quantization can be explained as a fermion exchange interaction effect. The Landauer conductance step Go is obtained when two-fermion interaction is considered. Reductions of Go are due to a many-particle exchange interaction effect. For ballistic GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wires longer than 1 um, a conductance step reduction is obtained in agreement with experimental results.
Even a single point defect in a quantum wire causes a conductance reduction. In this paper we prove (without any approximations) that for any point impurity this conductance reduction in all the sub-bands is exactly 2e^2/h. Moreover, it is shown that in the case of a surface defect, not only is the conductance minimum independent of the defect characteristics, but the transmission matrix also converges to universal (defect-independent) values. We also discuss particle confinement between two arbitrarily weak point defects.
We have recently shown that asymmetric lateral spin orbit coupling (LSOC) resulting from the lateral in-plane electric field of the confining potential of a side-gated quantum point contact (QPC) can be used to create a strongly spin- polarized current by purely electrical means1 in the absence of applied magnetic field. Using the non-equilibrium Green function formalism (NEGF) analysis of a small model QPC2, three ingredients were found to be essential to generate the strong spin polarization: an asymmetric lateral confinement, a LSOC induced by the lateral confining potential of the QPC, and…
Luttinger liquid theory describes one-dimensional electron systems in terms of non-interacting bosonic excitations. In this approximation thermal excitations are decoupled from the current flowing through a quantum wire, and the conductance is quantized. We show that relaxation processes not captured by the Luttinger liquid theory lead to equilibration of the excitations with the current and give rise to a temperature-dependent correction to the conductance. In long wires, the magnitude of the correction is expressed in terms of the velocities of bosonic excitations. In shorter wires it is con…
In a quantum wire with ideal helical modes, the conductance is quantized in units of e^2/h, provided the wire is connected to Fermi liquid leads. We show that this universality does not hold in partially gapped quasi-helical systems such as Rashba nanowires subject to a magnetic field, which are commonly used to mimic helical Luttinger liquids. Instead, their conductance takes a non-universal value that depends on the interactions in the wire, even in the presence of Fermi liquid leads. The non-universal conductance is rooted in a non-trivial mixing of spin and charge degrees of freedom, which…
We study the electron transport through a quantum wire under the influence of external time-dependent gate voltages. The wire is modelled by a tight-binding Hamiltonian for which we obtain the current from the corresponding transmission. The numerical evaluation of the dc current reveals that for bichromatic driving, the conductance depends sensitively on the commensurability of the driving frequencies. The current even possesses a discontinuous frequency dependence. Moreover, we find that the conductance as a function of the wire length oscillates with a period that depends on the ratio betwe…
We investigate a possibility of pair electron-electron e-e collisions in a ballistic wire with spin-orbit coupling and only one populated mode. Unlike in a spin-degenerate system, a combination of spin-splitting in momentum space with a momentum-dependent spin-precession opens up a finite phase space for pair e-e collisions around three distinct positions of the wire's chemical potential. For a short wire, we calculate corresponding resonant contributions to the conductance, which have different power-law temperature dependencies, and, in some cases, vanish if the wire's transverse confinement…
With the aid of the Friedel sum rule, we perform first-principles calculations of conductances through monatomic Na wires, taking into account the sharp tip geometry and discrete atomic structure of electrodes. We find that conductances (G) depend on the number (L) of atoms in the wires; G is G_0 (= 2e^2/h) for odd L, independent of the wire geometry, while G is generally smaller than $G_0$ and sensitive to the wire structure for even L. This even-odd behavior is attributed to the charge neutrality and resonant character due to the sharp tip structure. We suggest that similar even-odd behavior…
In this work, we study a possibility to measure the transverse and longitudinal relaxation times of a collection of polarized nuclear spins located in the region of a quantum wire via its conductance. The interplay of an external in-plane magnetic field, spin-orbit interaction, and the changing field of the spin-polarized nuclei cause the conductance of the quantum wire to evolve in time. We show that it is possible to extract the transverse and longitudinal relaxation times of the spin-polarized nuclei from the time dependence of the conductance.
It has been shown within the Landauer single-channel approach that the presence of the 0.7 anomaly in the conductance of a ballistic microcontact and the respective plateau in the thermopower implies unusual pinning of the potential barrier height $U$ at a depth of $k_BT$ below the Fermi level $E_F$. A simple way of taking into account the effect of electron-electron interaction on the profile and temperature dependence of a smooth one-dimensional potential barrier in the lower spin degeneracy subband of the microcontact has been proposed. The calculated temperature dependences of the conducta…
We devise an approach to measure the polarization of nuclear spins via conductance measurements. Specifically, we study the combined effect of external magnetic field, nuclear spin polarization, and Rashba spin-orbit interaction on the conductance of a quantum wire. Nonequilibrium nuclear spin polarization affects the electron energy spectrum making it time-dependent. Changes in the extremal points of the spectrum result in time-dependence of the conductance. The conductance oscillation pattern can be used to obtain information about the amplitude of the nuclear spin polarization and extract t…
The conductance of disordered wires with symplectic symmetry is studied by a random-matrix approach. It has been shown that the behavior of the conductance in the long-wire limit crucially depends on whether the number of conducting channels is even or odd. We focus on the metallic regime where the wire length is much smaller than the localization length, and calculate the ensemble-averaged conductance and its variance for both the even- and odd-channel cases. We find that the weak-antilocalization correction to the conductance in the odd-channel case is equivalent to that in the even-channel …
We have investigated the conductance of long quantum wires formed in GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures. Using realistic fluctuation potentials from donor layers we have simulated numerically the conductance of four different kinds of wires. While ideal wires show perfect quantization, potential fluctuations from random donors may give rise to strong conductance oscillations and degradation of the quantization plateaux. Statistically there is always the possibility of having large fluctuations in a sample that may effectively act as a microconstriction. We therefore introduce microconstrictions in t…
Quantum dots and single-molecule transistors may exhibit level crossings induced by tuning external parameters such as magnetic field or gate voltage. For Coulomb blockaded devices, this shows up as an inelastic cotunneling threshold in the differential conductance, which can be tuned to zero at the crossing. Here we show that, in addition, level crossings can give rise to a nearly vertical step-edge, ridge or even a Fano-like ridge-valley feature in the differential conductance inside the relevant Coulomb diamond. We study a gate-tunable quasidegeneracy between singlet and triplet ground stat…
We study conductance fluctuations in disordered quantum wires with unitary symmetry focusing on the case in which the number of conducting channels in one propagating direction is not equal to that in the opposite direction. We consider disordered wires with $N+m$ left-moving channels and $N$ right-moving channels. In this case, $m$ left-moving channels become perfectly conducting, and the dimensionless conductance $g$ for the left-moving channels behaves as $g \to m$ in the long-wire limit. We obtain the variance of $g$ in the diffusive regime by using the Dorokhov-Mello-Pereyra-Kumar equatio…
We study the conductance of a quantum wire in the presence of weak electron-electron scattering. In a sufficiently long wire the scattering leads to full equilibration of the electron distribution function in the frame moving with the electric current. At non-zero temperature this equilibrium distribution differs from the one supplied by the leads. As a result the contact resistance increases, and the quantized conductance of the wire acquires a quadratic in temperature correction. The magnitude of the correction is found by analysis of the conservation laws of the system and does not depend o…
For unpolarized electrons in a clean quantum wire, density functional theory reveals a thermally activated suppression of conductance. The activation temperature T_A grows slowly (roughly quadratically) with gate voltage due to pinning of the band edge at the chemical potential. Similar results were obtained experimentally by Kristensen et al. [Phys. Rev. B62, 10950 (2000)] for the temperature dependence of the anomalous conductance plateau near 0.7 (2e^2/h) in a quantum point contact.
We present first principles calculations of current-voltage characteristics (IVC) and conductance of Au(111):S2-cumulene-S2:Au(111) molecular wire junctions with realistic contacts. The transport properties are calculated using full self-consistent ab initio NEGF-DFT methods under external bias. The conductance of the cumulene wires shows oscillatory behavior depending on the number of carbon atoms (double bonds). Among all conjugated oligomers, we find that cumulene wires with odd number of carbon atoms yield the highest conductance with metallic-like ballistic transport behavior. The reason …
Using the Landauer formulation of transport theory, we predict that dielectric quantum wires should exhibit quantized thermal conductance at low temperatures in a ballistic phonon regime. The quantum of thermal conductance is universal, independent of the characteristics of the material, and equal to $π^2 k^2_B T /3h$ where $k_B$ is the Boltzmann constant, h is Planck's constant and T is the temperature. Quantized thermal conductance should be experimentally observable in suspended nanostructures adiabatically coupled to reservoirs, devices that can be realized at the present time.
We investigate the system-size dependence as well as the temperature dependence of the conductance in 1D electron systems, paying particular attention to the effect of Umklapp scattering. By taking into account the renormalization of the external potential due to electron-electron interaction, the correction to the conductance, 2e^2/h, due to Umklapp scattering is estimated perturbatively. The Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid parameter appears in the conductance via the system-size and temperature dependence.
We study the conductance of phase-coherent disordered quantum wires focusing on the case in which the number of conducting channels is imbalanced between two propagating directions. If the number of channels in one direction is by one greater than that in the opposite direction, one perfectly conducting channel without backscattering is stabilized regardless of wire length. Consequently, the dimensionless conductance does not vanish but converges to unity in the long-wire limit, indicating the absence of Anderson localization. To observe the influence of a perfectly conducting channel, we nume…
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…
We study the conductance of disordered wires with unitary symmetry focusing on the case in which $m$ perfectly conducting channels are present due to the channel-number imbalance between two-propagating directions. Using the exact solution of the Dorokhov-Mello-Pereyra-Kumar (DMPK) equation for transmission eigenvalues, we obtain the average and second moment of the conductance in the long-wire regime. For comparison, we employ the three-edge Chalker-Coddington model as the simplest example of channel-number-imbalanced systems with $m = 1$, and obtain the average and second moment of the condu…
We report on conductance fluctuation in quasi-one-dimensional wires made of epitaxial Bi$_{2}$Se$_{3}$ thin film. We found that this type of fluctuation decreases as the wire length becomes longer and that the amplitude of the fluctuation is well scaled to the coherence, thermal diffusion, and wire lengths, as predicted by conventional universal conductance fluctuation (UCF) theory. Additionally, the amplitude of the fluctuation can be understood to be equivalent to the UCF amplitude of a system with strong spin-orbit interaction and no time-reversal symmetry. These results indicate that the c…
The conductance fluctuations of a metallic wire which is interrupted by a small tunnel junction has been explored experimentally. In this system, the bias voltage V, which drops almost completely inside the tunnel barrier, is used to probe the energy dependence of conductance fluctuations due to disorder in the wire. We find that the variance of the fluctuations is directly proportional to V. The experimental data are consistently described by a theoretical model with two phenomenological parameters: the phase breaking time at low temperatures and the diffusion coefficient.
We show that off-diagonal nearest neighbor disorder in quasi-one-dimensional single particle tight-binding coupled chains leads to anomalies in the density of states and in the mean conductance, that can be interpreted as due to specific resonances of the band structure of the perfect system underlying the disordered one. We demonstrate that this phenomenology may appear not necessarily at the energy E=0 as reported so far in the literature and we show that also the even-odd chain number effect on the mean conductance is ruled by the same resonances. For different cases we provide a series exp…
We calculate the distribution of the conductance G in a one-dimensional disordered wire at finite temperature T and bias voltage V in a independent-electron picture and assuming full coherent transport. At high enough temperature and bias voltage, where several resonances of the system contribute to the conductance, the distribution P(G(T,V)) can be represented with good accuracy by autoconvolutions of the distribution of the conductance at zero temperature and zero bias voltage. The number of convolutions depends on T and V. In the regime of very low T and V, where only one resonance is relev…
We show that the interaction constant governing the long-range electron-electron interaction in a quantum wire coupled to two reservoirs and capacitively coupled to a gate can be determined by a low frequency measurement. We present a self-consistent, charge and current conserving theory of the full conductance matrix. The collective excitation spectrum consists of plasma modes with a relaxation rate which increases with the interaction strength and is inversely proportional to the length of the wire. The interaction parameter is determined by the first two coefficients of the out-of-phase com…
A scanning tunnelling microscope is used to pull a polythiophene wire from a Au(111) surface while measuring the current traversing the junction. Abrupt current increases measured during the lifting procedure are associated to the detachment of molecular sub-units, in apparent contradiction with the expected exponential decrease of the conductance with wire length. \textit{Ab initio} simulations reproduce the experimental data and demonstrate that this unexpected behavior is due to release of mechanical stress in the wire, paving the way to mechanically gated single-molecule electronic devices…
Quasi-ballistic semiconductor quantum wires are exposed to localized perpendicular magnetic fields, also known as magnetic barriers. Pronounced, reproducible conductance fluctuations as a function of the magnetic barrier amplitude are observed. The fluctuations are strongly temperature dependent and remain visible up to temperatures of about 10 K. Simulations based on recursive Green functions suggest that the conductance fluctuations originate from parametric interferences of the electronic wave functions which experience scattering between the magnetic barrier and the electrostatic potential…
In this letter we study the coherent electronic transport through a metallic nanowire with magnetic impurities. The spins of these impurities are considered as frozen to mimic a low temperature spin glass phase. The transport properties of the wire are derived from a numerical Landauer technique which provides the conductance of the wire as a function of the disorder configuration. We show that the correlation of conductance between two spin configurations provides a measure of the correlation between these spin configurations. This correlation corresponds to the mean field overlap in the abse…
We study conductance cumulants $<< g^n >>$ and current cumulants $C_j$ related to heat and electrical transport in coherent mesoscopic quantum wires near the diffusive regime. We consider the asymptotic behavior in the limit where the number of channels and the length of the wire in the units of the mean free path are large but the bare conductance is fixed. A recursion equation unifying the descriptions of the standard and Bogoliubov--de Gennes (BdG) symmetry classes is presented. We give values and come up with a novel scaling form for the higher-order conductance cumulants. In the BdG wires…
One dimensional (1D) quantum wires exhibit a conductance feature near 0.7 x 2e^2/h in connection with many-body interactions involving the electron spin. With the possibility of exploiting this effect for novel spintronic device applications, efforts have focused on uncovering a complete microscopic theory to explain this conductance anomaly. Here we present conductance calculations based on a simple phenomenological model for a gate-dependent spin gap that are in excellent agreement with experimental data taken on ultra-low-disorder quantum wires. Taken together the phenomenology and experime…
We present a theoretical analysis of recent experimental results of Yacoby et al. on transport properties of high quality quantum wires. We suggest an explanation of observed deviations of the conductance from the universal value $2e^2/h$ per channel in the wire. We argue that at low temperatures and biases the deviation can be a consequence of anomalously enhanced backscattering of electrons entering the 2DEG from the wire and is not connected to intrinsic properties of 1DEG.
We report on magnetic field dependence of half-integer quantized conductance plateaus (HQPs) in InAs quantum wires. We observed HQPs at zero applied magnetic field in InAs quantum wires fabricated from a high-quality InAs quantum well. The application of in-plane magnetic field causes Zeeman splitting of the HQP features, indicating that the origin of the observed HQP is not spontaneous spin polarization. Additionally we observe that conductance of the split HQPs decreases gradually as the in-plane magnetic field increases. We finally assume electron-electron interaction as a possible mechanis…
A non-equilibrium Green's function formalism is used to study in detail the ballistic conductance of asymmetrically biased side-gated quantum point contacts (QPCs) in the presence of lateral spin-orbit coupling and electron-electron interaction for a wide range of QPC dimensions and gate bias voltage. Various conductance anomalies are predicted below the first quantized conductance plateau (G0=2e2/h) which occur due to spontaneous spin polarization in the narrowest portion of the QPC. The number of observed conductance anomalies increases with increasing aspect ratio (length/width) of the QPC …
We study the effect of electron-electron interaction on the transport properties of short clean quantum wires adiabatically connected to reservoirs. Interactions lead to resonances in a multi-channel wire at particular values of the Fermi energy. We investigate in detail the resonance in a two-channel wire. The (negative) conductance correction peaks at the resonance, and decays exponentially as the Fermi energy is tuned away; the resonance width being given by the temperature. Likewise, the thermopower shows a characteristic structure, which is surprisingly well approximated by the so-called …
We determine analytically the distribution of conductances of quasi one-dimensional disordered electron systems, neglecting electron-electron interaction, for all strengths of disorder. We find that in the crossover region between the metallic and insulating regimes, P(g) is highly asymmetric, given by ``one-sided'' log-normal distribution. For larger disorder, the tail of the log-normal distribution is cut-off for g > 1 by a Gaussian.
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…
In this letter we study the conductance G through one-dimensional quantum wires with disorder configurations characterized by long-tailed distributions (Levy-type disorder). We calculate analytically the conductance distribution which reveals a universal statistics: the distribution of conductances is fully determined by the exponent αof the power-law decay of the disorder distribution and the average < ln G >, i.e., all other details of the disorder configurations are irrelevant. For 0< α< 1 we found that the fluctuations of ln G are not self-averaging and < ln G > scales with the length of t…
We investigate theoretically the spin-dependent electron transport in a Rashba quantum wire with rough edges. The charge and spin conductances are calculated as function of the electron energy or the wire length by adopting the spinresolved lattice Green function method. For a single disordered Rashba wire, it is found that the charge conductance quantization is destroyed by the edge disorder. However, a nonzero spin conductance can be generated and its amplitude can be manipulated by the wire length, which is attributed to the broken structure symmetries and the spin-dependent quantum interfe…
The transmission through quantum wires is studied within a noninteracting model taking into account the geometry of cleaved edge overgrowth devices. We show that the junction between wide contact and narrow wire has almost no influence on the transmission through these devices while a potential step between contact and wire strongly effects the conduction. Our results are compared with recent experimental findings.
Finite size effects in the localization properties of disordered quantum wires are analyzed through conductance calculations. Disorder is induced by introducing vacancies at random positions in the wire and thus preserving the chiral symmetry. For quasi one-dimensional geometries and low concentration of vacancies, an exponential decay of the mean conductance with the wire length is obtained even at the center of the energy band. For wide wires, finite size effects cause the conductance to decay following a non-pure exponential law. We propose an analytical formula for the mean conductance tha…
We study the effect that resistive regions have on the conductance of a quantum wire with interacting electrons which is connected to Fermi liquid leads. Using the bosonization formalism and a Rayleigh dissipation function to model the power dissipation, we use both scattering theory and Green's function techniques to derive the DC conductance. The resistive regions are generally found to lead to incoherent transport. For a single wire, we find that the resistance adds in series to the contact resistance of h/e^2 for spinless electrons, and the total resistance is independent of the Luttinger …
We calculate the finite-temperature conductance of clean, weakly interacting one-dimensional quantum wires subject to Rashba spin-orbit coupling and a magnetic field. For chemical potentials near the center of the Zeeman gap ($μ= 0$), two-particle scattering causes the leading deviation from the quantized conductance at finite temperatures. On the other hand, for $|μ| > 0$, three-particle scattering processes become more relevant. These deviations are a consequence of the strongly nonlinear single-particle spectrum, and are thus not accessible using Luttinger liquid theory. We discuss the obse…
We theoretically investigate a quasi-one-dimensional quantum wire, where the lowest two subbands are populated, in the presence of a helical magnetic field. We uncover a backscattering mechanism involving the helical magnetic field and Coulomb interaction between the electrons. The combination of these ingredients results in scattering resonances and partial gaps which give rise to non-standard plateaus and conductance dips at certain electron densities. The positions and values of these dips are independent of material parameters, serving as direct transport signatures of this mechanism. Our …
We calculate the distribution of the conductance P(g) for a quasi-one-dimensional system in the metal to insulator crossover regime, based on a recent analytical method valid for all strengths of disorder. We show the evolution of P(g) as a function of the disorder parameter from a insulator to a metal. Our results agree with numerical studies reported on this problem, and with analytical results for the average and variance of g.
We investigate the transport properties of narrow quantum wires realized in disordered two-dimensional electron gases in the presence of k-linear Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit interaction (SOI), and an applied in-plane magnetic field. Building on previous work [Scheid, et al., PRL 101, 266401 (2008)], we find that in addition to the conductance, the universal conductance fluctuations also feature anisotropy with respect to the magnetic field direction. This anisotropy can be explained solely from the symmetries exhibited by the Hamiltonian as well as the relative strengths of the Rashba an…
Recent experimental searches for signatures of Majorana-like excitations in proximitized semiconducting nanowires involve conductance spectroscopy, where the evidence sought after is a robust zero-bias peak (in longer wires) and its characteristic field-dependent splitting (in shorter wires). Although experimental results partially confirm the theoretical predictions, commonly observed discrepancies still include (i) a zero-bias peak that is significantly lower than the predicted value of $2e^2/h$ and (ii) the absence of the expected "Majorana oscillations" of the lowest-energy modes at higher…
We calculate the entire distribution of the conductance P(G) of a one-dimensional disordered system --quantum wire-- subject to a time-dependent field. Our calculations are based on Floquet theory and a scaling approach to localization. Effects of the applied ac field on the conductance statistics can be strong and in some cases dramatic, as in the high-frequency regime where the conductance distribution shows a sharp cut-off. In this frequency regime, the conductance is written as a product of a frequency-dependent term and a field independent term, the latter containing the information on th…
