Charge transport in a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid effects of pumping and bias.pdf

a r X i v : c o n d - m a t / 0 7 0 2 4 2 9 v 2 [ c o n d - m a t .m e s - h a l l ] 7 J u l 2 0 0 7 Charge transport in a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid: effects of pumping and bias Amit Agarwal and Diptiman Sen Center for High Energy Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India (Dated: February 6, 2008) We study the current produced in a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid by an applied bias and by weak, point-like impurity potentials which are oscillating in time. We use bosonization to perturbatively calculate the current up to second order in the impurity potentials. In the regime of small bias and low pumping frequency, both the DC and AC components of the current have power law dependences on the bias and pumping frequencies with an exponent 2K ? 1 for spinless electrons, where K is the interaction parameter. For K 1/2, the current grows large for special values of the bias. For non-interacting electrons with K = 1, our results agree with those obtained using Floquet scattering theory for Dirac fermions. We also discuss the cases of extended impurities and of spin-1/2 electrons. PACS numbers: 73.23.-b, 73.63.Nm, 71.10.Pm I. INTRODUCTION The conductance of electrons in a quantum wire has been studied extensively in recent years both theoreti- cally [1, 2] and experimentally [3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. For a wire in which only one channel is available to the elec- trons and the transport is ballistic (i.e., there are no im- purities inside the wire, and there is no scattering from phonons or from the contacts between the wire and its leads), the conductance is given by G = 2e2/h for in- finitesimal bias. However, if there is an impurity inside the wire which scatters the electrons, then the conduc- tance is reduced. For a δ-function impurity with strength U , we obtain G = (2e2/h) (1 ? U2/v2F ), to lowest order in U , where vF is the Fermi velocity of the electrons. In the presence of interactions between the electrons, the impurity strength U effectively be