No Arabic abstract
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.
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 extended Hubbard model. This model is mapped onto an extended Anderson model, which in the limit of low temperatures is expected to lead to Kondo resonance physics and pronounced many-body effects.
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.
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 anomalies are robust and survive to temperatures of a few degrees. With increasing magnetic field the conductance exhibits a plateau at e^2/h, consistent with recent experiments.
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.
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.