Theory of a peristaltic pump for fermionic quantum fluids

TL;DR

This paper introduces a theoretical model of a peristaltic quantum pump for fermionic fluids, analyzing its behavior using lattice Green's functions, with applications to cold atoms and nanostructures.

Contribution

It proposes a novel peristaltic quantum pump model for fermionic systems and analyzes its properties using a lattice Green's function approach, extending the understanding of quantum transport mechanisms.

Findings

The pumped particle flux depends on frequency, potential width, mean free path, and temperature.

The model applies to both nanostructured systems and cold atom experiments.

Validation with fermionic cold atom systems demonstrates practical relevance.

Abstract

Motivated by the recent developments in fermionic cold atoms and in nanostructured systems, we propose the model of a peristaltic quantum pump. Differently from the Thouless paradigm, a peristaltic pump is a quantum device that generates a particle flux as the effect of a sliding finite-size microlattice. A one-dimensional tight-binding Hamiltonian model of this quantum machine is formulated and analyzed within a lattice Green's function formalism on the Keldysh contour. The pump observables, as e.g. the pumped particles per cycle, are studied as a function of the pumping frequency, the width of the pumping potential, the particles mean free path and system temperature. The proposed analysis applies to arbitrary peristaltic potentials acting on fermionic quantum fluids confined to one dimension. These confinement conditions can be realized in nanostructured systems or, in a more controllable way, in cold atoms experiments. In view of the validation of the theoretical results, we describe the outcomes of the model considering a fermionic cold atoms system as a paradigmatic example.