No Arabic abstract
The contact conductance between graphene and two quantum wires which serve as the leads to connect graphene and electron reservoirs is theoretically studied. Our investigation indicates that the contact conductance depends sensitively on the graphene-lead coupling configuration. When each quantum wire couples solely to one carbon atom, the contact conductance vanishes at the Dirac point if the two carbon atoms coupling to the two leads belong to the same sublattice of graphene. We find that such a feature arises from the chirality of the Dirac electron in graphene. Such a chirality associated with conductance zero disappears when a quantum wire couples to multiple carbon atoms. The general result irrelevant to the coupling configuration is that the contact conductance decays rapidly with the increase of the distance between the two leads. In addition, in the weak graphene-lead coupling limit, when the distance between the two leads is much larger than the size of the graphene-lead contact areas and the incident electron energy is close to the Dirac point, the contact conductance is proportional to the square of the product of the two graphene-lead contact areas, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the two leads.
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, consistent with recent experiments.
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 on the details of the interaction mechanism responsible for equilibration.
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 landscape.
A weakly bound electron in a semiconductor quantum wire is shown to become entangled with an itinerant electron via the coulomb interaction. The degree of entanglement and its variation with energy of the injected electron, may be tuned by choice of spin and initial momentum. Full entanglement is achieved close to energies where there are spin-dependent resonances. Possible realisations of related device structures are discussed.
The relationship between the universal conductance fluctuation and the weak localization effect in monolayer graphene is investigated. By comparing experimental results with the predictions of the weak localization theory for graphene, we find that the ratio of the elastic intervalley scattering time to the inelastic dephasing time varies in accordance with the conductance fluctuation; this is a clear evidence connecting the universal conductance fluctuation with the weak localization effect. We also find a series of scattering lengths that are related to the phase shifts caused by magnetic flux by Fourier analysis.