We show that for a quantum wire with a local asymmetric scattering potential the principal channels for charge and heat rectification decouple and renormalise differently under electron interactions, with heat rectification generally being more relevant. The polarisation of the rectification results from quantum interference and is tuneable through external gating. Furthermore, for spin polarised or helical electrons and sufficiently strong interactions a regime can be obtained in which heat transport is strongly rectified but charge rectification is very weak.
We investigate rectification of a low-frequency ac bias in Y-junctions of one-channel Luttinger liquid wires with repulsive electron interaction. Rectification emerges due to three scatterers in the wires. We find that it is possible to achieve a higher rectification current in a Y-junction than in a single wire with an asymmetric scatterer at the same interaction strength and voltage bias. The rectification effect is the strongest in the absence of the time-reversal symmetry. In that case, the maximal rectification current can be comparable with the total current $\sim e^2V/h$ even for low vo…
We show that electron transport in disordered quantum wires can be described by a modified Cooperon equation, which coincides in form with the Dirac equation for the massive fermions in a 1+1 dimensional system. In this new formalism, we calculate the DC electric current induced by electromagnetic fields in quasi-one-dimensional rings. This current changes sign, from diamagnetic to paramagnetic, depending on the amplitude and frequency of the time-dependent external electromagnetic field.
An anomalous Hall effect and rectification of a Hall voltage are observed by applying a radio-frequency (rf) current through a single-layered ferromagnetic wire located on a coplanar waveguide. The components of the magnetization precession, both in and perpendicular to the plane, can be detected via the Hall voltage rectification of the rf current by incorporating an additional direct (dc) current. In this paper, we propose a phenomenological model, which describes the time-dependent anisotropic magnetoresistance and time-dependent planer Hall effect. The nonlinearity of the spin dynamics acc…
We address an unexpectedly large rectification using a simple quantum wire with correlated site potentials. The external electric field, associated with voltage bias, leads to unequal charge currents for two different polarities of external bias and this effect is further enhanced by incorporating the asymmetry in wire-to-electrode coupling. Our calculations suggest that in some cases almost cent percent rectification is obtained for a wide bias window. This performance is valid against disorder configurations and thus we can expect an experimental verification of our theoretical analysis in n…
Spin and charge currents can be generated by an ac voltage through a one-channel quantum wire with strong electron interactions in a static uniform magnetic field. In a certain range of low voltages, the spin current can grow as a negative power of the voltage bias as the voltage decreases. The spin current expressed in units of hbar/2 per second can become much larger than the charge current in units of the electron charge per second. The system requires neither spin-polarized particle injection nor time-dependent magnetic fields.
Experimental results of rectification of a constant wave radio frequency (RF) current flowing in a single-layered ferromagnetic wire are presented. We show that a detailed external magnetic field dependence of the RF current induced a direct-current voltage spectrum. The mechanism of the rectification is discussed in a term of the spin transfer torque, and the rectification is closely related to resonant spin wave excitation with the assistant of the spin-polarized RF current. The micromagnetic simulation taking into account the spin transfer torque provides strong evidence which supports the …
We demonstrate that spin current can be generated by an ac voltage in a one-channel quantum wire with strong repulsive electron interactions in the presence of a non-magnetic impurity and uniform static magnetic field. In a certain range of voltages, the spin current can exhibit a power dependence on the ac voltage bias with a negative exponent. The spin current expressed in units of $\hbar/2$ per second can become much larger than the charge current in units of the electron charge per second. The spin current generation requires neither spin-polarized particle injection nor time-dependent mag…
Rectification is a process that converts electromagnetic fields into a direct current. Such a process underlies a wide range of technologies such as wireless communication, wireless charging, energy harvesting, and infrared detection. Existing rectifiers are mostly based on semiconductor diodes, with limited applicability to small voltage or high frequency inputs. Here, we present an alternative approach to current rectification that uses the intrinsic electronic properties of quantum crystals without using semiconductor junctions. We identify a previously unknown mechanism for rectification f…
Recently, rectifying direction inversion has been observed in dipyrimidinyl-diphenyl (PMPH) diblock molecular wire [J. Am. Chem. Soc. (2005) 127, 10456], and a protonation mechanism was suggested to explain this interesting phenomena. In this paper, we study the protonation effect on transport properties of PMPH molecule by first principles calculations. No significant rectification is found for the pristine diblock molecular wire. Protonation leads to conductance enhancement and rectification. However, for all considered junctions with rectifying effect, the preferential current directions ar…
We study a system consisting of a junction of N quantum wires, where the junction is characterized by a scalar S-matrix, and an impurity spin is coupled to the electrons close to the junction. The wires are modeled as weakly interacting Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids. We derive the renormalization group equations for the Kondo couplings of the spin to the electronic modes on different wires, and analyze the renormalization group flows and fixed points for different values of the initial Kondo couplings and of the junction S-matrix (such as the decoupled S-matrix and the Griffiths S-matrix). We gen…
In this work, we present a mechanism that, based on quantum-mechanical principles, allows one to recover kinetic energy at the nanoscale. Our premise is that very small mechanical excitations, such as those arising from sound waves propagating through a nanoscale system or similar phenomena, can be quite generally converted into useful electrical work by applying the same principles behind conventional adiabatic quantum pumping. The proposal is potentially useful for nanoscale vibrational energy harvesting where it can have several advantages. The most important one is that it avoids the use o…
We study the influence of laser radiation on the electron transport through a molecular wire weakly coupled to two leads. In the absence of a generalized parity symmetry, the molecule rectifies the laser induced current, resulting in directed electron transport without any applied voltage. We consider two generic ways of dynamical symmetry breaking: mixing of different harmonics of the laser field and molecules consisting of asymmetric groups. For the evaluation of the nonlinear current, a numerically efficient formalism is derived which is based upon the Floquet solutions of the driven molecu…
We derive an explicit expression for the quantum conductivity of a molecular wire containing a redox center, which is embedded in an electrochemical environment. The redox center interacts with the solvent, and the average over the solvent configurations is performed numerically. Explicit calculations have been performed for a chain of three atoms. When the redox center interacts strongly with neighboring electronic levels, the current-potential curves show interesting features like rectification, current plateaus and negative differential resistance. Electronic spectroscopy of intermediate st…
The broadband ferromagnetic resonance measurement using the rectifying effect of Ni81Fe19 wire has been investigated. One wire is deposited on the center strip line of the coplanar waveguide (CPW) and the other one deposited between two strip lines of CPW. The method is based on the detection of the magnetoresistance oscillation due to the magnetization dynamics induced by the radio frequency field. The magnetic field dependences of the resonance frequency and the rectification spectrum are presented and analytically interpreted on the standpoint of a uniform magnetization precession model.
Wireless technology relies on the conversion of alternating electromagnetic fields to direct currents, a process known as rectification. While rectifiers are normally based on semiconductor diodes, quantum mechanical non-reciprocal transport effects that enable highly controllable rectification have recently been discovered. One such effect is magnetochiral anisotropy (MCA), where the resistance of a material or a device depends on both the direction of current flow and an applied magnetic field. However, the size of rectification possible due to MCA is usually extremely small, because MCA rel…
The rectifying effect of radio-frequency (RF) current is highly sensitive in terms of the spatial spin distribution and dynamics. It emerged that an additional spin wave mode was stimulated by the direct-current (DC) current and that this spin wave was detectable via rectification of the RF current. A phenomenological model to describe the time-dependent anisotropic magnetoresistance or time-dependent planer Hall effect is proposed and found to correlate well to the experimental results. The nonlinear spin dynamics accompanying additional spin waves are studied as functions of the RF and DC cu…
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…
We investigate a one-dimensional electron liquid with two point scatterers of different strength. In the presence of electron interactions, the nonlinear conductance is shown to depend on the current direction. The resulting asymmetry of the transport characteristic gives rise to a ratchet effect, i.e., the rectification of a dc current for an applied ac voltage. In the case of strong repulsive interactions, the ratchet current grows in a wide voltage interval with decreasing ac voltage. In the regime of weak interaction the current-voltage curve exhibits oscillatory behavior. Our results appl…
We construct a coupled wire model for a sequence of non-Abelian quantum Hall states occurring at filling factors $ν=2/(2M+q)$ with integers $M$ and even(odd) integers $q$ for fermionic(bosonic) states. They are termed $Z_2 \times Z_2$ orbifold states, which have a topological order with a neutral sector described by the $c=1$ orbifold conformal field theory (CFT) at radius $R_{\rm orbifold}=\sqrt{p/2}$ with even integers $p$. When $p=2$, the state can be viewed as two decoupled layers of Moore-Read (MR) state, whose neutral sector is described by the Ising $\times$ Ising CFT and contains a $Z_…
We study the effects of electron-electron interactions on the transport properties of a junction of three quantum wires enclosing a magnetic flux. The wires are modeled as single channel spin-1/2 Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids. The system exhibits a rich phase diagram as a function of the electronic interaction strength, which includes a chiral fixed point with an asymmetric current flow highly sensitive to the sign of the flux, and another fixed point where pair tunneling dominates, similarly to the case of spinless electrons. While in the case of spinless electrons the perturbations that corresp…
Coherent electronic transport through a molecular device is studied using non-equilibrium Green's function (NEGF) formalism. Such device is made of a short linear wire which is connected to para- and ferromagnetic electrodes. Molecule itself is described with the help of Huckel (tight-binding) model with the electron interactions treated within Hubbard approach, while the coupling to the electrodes is modeled through the use of a broad-band theory. Coulomb interactions within molecular wire are treated by means of the Hartree-Fock (HF) approximation. For the case of asymmetric coupling to para…
We consider electrons in a quantum wire interacting via a long-range Coulomb potential screened by a nearby gate. We focus on the quantum phase transition from a strictly one-dimensional to a quasi-one-dimensional electron liquid, that is controlled by the dimensionless parameter $n x_0$, where $n$ is the electron density and $x_0$ is the characteristic length of the transverse confining potential. If this transition occurs in the low-density limit, it can be understood as the deformation of the one-dimensional Wigner crystal to a zigzag arrangement of the electrons described by an Ising order…
The rectification of electromagnetic waves to direct currents is a crucial process for energy harvesting, beyond-5G wireless communications, ultra-fast science, and observational astronomy. As the radiation frequency is raised to the sub-terahertz (THz) domain, ac-to-dc conversion by conventional electronics becomes challenging and requires alternative rectification protocols. Here we address this challenge by tunnel field-effect transistors made of bilayer graphene (BLG). Taking advantage of BLG's electrically tunable band structure, we create a lateral tunnel junction and couple it to an ant…
We construct two-dimensional non-Abelian topologically ordered states by strongly coupling arrays of one-dimensional quantum wires via interactions. In our scheme, all charge degrees of freedom are gapped, so the construction can use either quantum wires or quantum spin chains as building blocks, with the same end result. The construction gaps the degrees of freedom in the bulk, while leaving decoupled states at the edges that are described by conformal field theories (CFT) in $(1+1)$-dimensional space and time. We consider both the cases where time-reversal symmetry (TRS) is present or absent…
We consider a simple setup in which a small quantum dot is strongly connected to a finite size box. This box can be either a metallic box or a finite size quantum wire.The formation of the Kondo screening cloud in the box strongly depends on the ratio between the Kondo temperature and the box level spacing. By weakly connecting two metallic reservoirs to the quantum dot, a detailed spectroscopic analysis can be performed. Since the transport channels and the screening channels are almost decoupled, such a setup allows an easier access to the measure of finite-size effects associated with the f…
We investigate the distribution of the electron density and the potential in a quantum wire coupled to reservoirs, treating this structure as a unified quantum system and taking into account the Coulomb interaction of electrons. The chemical potential difference that exists between a decoupled, isolated quantum wire and the reservoirs gives rise to charge transfer in the coupled system. We show that the quantum wire can be charged positively or negatively or remain neutral as a whole, depending on such factors as the wire radius and the background charge density in the wire. The magnitude of t…
Rectification of thermal fluctuations in mesoscopic conductors is the key idea of today's attempts to build nanoscale thermoelectric energy harvesters in order to convert heat into a useful electric power. So far, most concepts make use of the Seebeck effect in a two-terminal geometry where heat and charge are both carried by the same particles. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the working principle of a new kind of energy harvester, proposed recently using two capacitively coupled quantum dots. We show that due to its novel three-terminal design which spatially separates the heat reservoir…
We present a scheme comprised of a one-dimensional system with repulsive interactions, in which the formation of bound pairs can take place in an easily tunable fashion.By capacitively coupling a primary electronic quantum wire of interest to a secondary strongly-correlated fermionic system, the intrinsic electron-electron repulsion may be overcome, promoting the formation of bound electron pairs in the primary wire. The intrinsic repulsive interactions tend to favor the formation of charge density waves of these pairs, yet we find that superconducting correlations are dominant in a limited pa…
