Quantization of Conductance in Quasi-Periodic Quantum Wires

TL;DR

This paper investigates charge transport in quasi-periodic and aperiodic quantum wires, revealing conductance quantization in certain regimes and its suppression in localized phases, through numerical analysis of the Peierls-Harper and Thue-Morse models.

Contribution

It provides numerical evidence of conductance quantization in quasi-periodic and aperiodic quantum wires, highlighting the effects of coupling strength and spectral properties.

Findings

Quantized conductance in the weak coupling regime.

Vanishing conductance in the strong coupling localization regime.

Conductance quantization at many energies in the Thue-Morse model.

Abstract

We study charge transport in the Peierls-Harper model with a quasi-periodic cosine potential. We compute the Landauer-type conductance of the wire. Our numerical results show the following: (i) When the Fermi energy lies in the absolutely continuous spectrum that is realized in the regime of the weak coupling, the conductance is quantized to the universal conductance. (ii) For the regime of localization that is realized for the strong coupling, the conductance is always vanishing irrespective of the value of the Fermi energy. Unfortunately, we cannot make a definite conclusion about the case with the critical coupling. We also compute the conductance of the Thue-Morse model. Although the potential of the model is not quasi-periodic, the energy spectrum is known to be a Cantor set with zero Lebesgue measure. Our numerical results for the Thue-Morse model also show the quantization of the conductance at many locations of the Fermi energy, except for the trivial localization regime. Besides, for the rest of the values of the Fermi energy, the conductance shows a similar behavior to that of the Peierls-Harper model with the critical coupling.