Conductance of Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid wires and junctions with resistances

ORAL

Abstract

We study the effect that resistive regions have on the conductance of a quantum wire with interacting electrons which is connected to Fermi liquid leads. Using the bosonization formalism and a Rayleigh dissipation function to model the power dissipation, we use Green's function techniques to derive the DC conductance. The resistive regions are generally found to lead to incoherent transport. For a single wire, we find that the resistance adds in series to the contact resistance of $e^2/h$ for spinless electrons, and the total resistance is independent of the Luttinger parameter $K_W$ of the wire. We numerically solve the bosonic equations to illustrate what happens when a charge density pulse is incident on the wire; the results depend on the parameters of the resistive and interaction regions in interesting ways. For a junction of Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid wires, we use a dissipationless current splitting matrix to model the junction. For a three-wire junction, there are two families of such matrices; we find that the conductance matrix depends on $K_W$ for one family but is independent of $K_W$ for the other family.

Authors

  • Diptiman Sen

    Centre for High Energy Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore

  • Abhiram Soori

    Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore