Electronic transport at finite voltages in free-standing gold atomic chains of up to 7 atoms in length is studied at low temperatures using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). The conductance vs voltage curves show that transport in these single-mode ballistic atomic wires is non-dissipative up to a finite voltage threshold of the order of several mV. The onset of dissipation and resistance within the wire corresponds to the excitation of the atomic vibrations by the electrons traversing the wire and is very sensitive to strain.
The acoustic phonon-mediated drag-contribution to the drag current created in the ballistic transport regime in a one-dimensional nanowire by phonons generated by a current-carrying ballistic channel in a nearby nanowire is calculated. The threshold of the phonon-mediated drag current with respect to bias or gate voltage is predicted.
We have studied the Zeeman splitting in ballistic hole quantum wires formed in a (311)A quantum well by surface gate confinement. Transport measurements clearly show lifting of the spin degeneracy and crossings of the subbands when an in-plane magnetic field B is applied parallel to the wire. When B is oriented perpendicular to the wire, no spin-splitting is discernible up to B = 8.8 T. The observed large Zeeman splitting anisotropy in our hole quantum wires demonstrates the importance of quantum-confinement for spin-splitting in nanostructures with strong spin-orbit coupling.
Quantum conductance fluctuations are investigated in disordered 3D topological insulator quantum wires. Both experiments and theory reveal a new transport regime in a mesoscopic conductor, pseudo-ballistic transport, for which ballistic properties persist beyond the transport mean free path, characteristic of diffusive transport. It results in non-universal conductance fluctuations due to quasi-1D surface modes, as observed in long and narrow Bi$_2$Se$_3$ nanoribbons. Spin helical Dirac fermions in quantum wires retain pseudo-ballistic properties over an unusually broad energy range, due to strong quantum confinement and weak momentum scattering.
In the first part of our theoretical study of correlated atomic wires on substrates, we introduced lattice models for a one-dimensional quantum wire on a three-dimensional substrate and their approximation by quasi-one-dimensional effective ladder models [arXiv:1704.07350]. In this second part, we apply this approach to the case of a correlated wire with a Hubbard-type electron-electron repulsion deposited on an insulating substrate. The ground-state and spectral properties are investigated numerically using the density-matrix renormalization group method and quantum Monte Carlo simulations. As a function of the model parameters, we observe various phases with quasi-one-dimensional low-energy excitations localized in the wire, namely paramagnetic Mott insulators, Luttinger liquids, and spin-$1/2$ Heisenberg chains. The validity of the effective ladder models is assessed by studying the convergence with the number of legs and comparing to the full three-dimensional model. We find that narrow ladder models accurately reproduce the quasi-one-dimensional excitations of the full three-dimensional model but predict only qualitatively whether excitations are localized around the wire or delocalized in the three-dimensional substrate.
We investigate the low-energy collective charge excitations (plasmons, holons) in metallic atomic wires deposited on semiconducting substrates. These systems are described by two-dimensional correlated models representing strongly anisotropic lattices or weakly coupled chains. Well-established theoretical approaches and results are used to study their properties: random phase approximation for anisotropic Fermi liquids and bosonization for coupled Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids as well as Bethe Ansatz and density-matrix renormalization group methods for ladder models. We show that the Fermi and Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid theories predict the same qualitative behavior for the dispersion of excitations at long wave lengths. Moreover, their scaling depends on the choice of the effective electron-electron interaction but does not characterize the dimensionality of the metallic state. Our results also suggest that such anisotropic correlated systems can exhibit two-dimensional dispersions due to the coupling between wires but remain quasi-one-dimensional strongly anisotropic conductors or retain typical features of Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids such as the power-law behaviour of the density of states at the Fermi energy. Thus it is possible that atomic wire materials such as Au/Ge(100) exhibit a mixture of features associated with one and two dimensional metals.