Coulomb drag between ballistic one-dimensional electron systems

TL;DR

This paper reviews theoretical models and experimental findings on Coulomb drag in ballistic one-dimensional electron systems, highlighting differences between Fermi and Luttinger liquid theories and their temperature dependencies.

Contribution

It compares Fermi and Luttinger liquid theories of Coulomb drag, emphasizing their distinct temperature dependence predictions and correlating them with experimental results.

Findings

Maximum drag resistance when subbands align and small Fermi wave vector

Exponential decay of drag with inter-wire separation

Power-law temperature dependence confirmed experimentally

Abstract

The presence of pronounced electronic correlations in one-dimensional systems strongly enhances Coulomb coupling and is expected to result in distinctive features in the Coulomb drag between them that are absent in the drag between two-dimensional systems. We review recent Fermi and Luttinger liquid theories of Coulomb drag between ballistic one-dimensional electron systems, and give a brief summary of the experimental work reported so far on one-dimensional drag. Both the Fermi liquid (FL) and the Luttinger liquid (LL) theory predict a maximum of the drag resistance R_D when the one-dimensional subbands of the two quantum wires are aligned and the Fermi wave vector k_F is small, and also an exponential decay of R_D with increasing inter-wire separation, both features confirmed by experimental observations. A crucial difference between the two theoretical models emerges in the temperature dependence of the drag effect. Whereas the FL theory predicts a linear temperature dependence, the LL theory promises a rich and varied dependence on temperature depending on the relative magnitudes of the energy and length scales of the systems. At higher temperatures, the drag should show a power-law dependence on temperature, $R_D \~ T^x$, experimentally confirmed in a narrow temperature range, where x is determined by the Luttinger liquid parameters. The spin degree of freedom plays an important role in the LL theory in predicting the features of the drag effect and is crucial for the interpretation of experimental results.