Transport through Dirty Luttinger Liquids Connected to Reservoirs

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that electron-electron interactions and disorder in Luttinger-liquid quantum wires influence conductance, with corrections depending on temperature and length, explaining recent experimental observations.

Contribution

It reveals how interactions affect conductance in disordered Luttinger liquids connected to leads, contrasting with perfect wires.

Findings

Conductance correction scales with temperature and length.

Interaction strength determines the scaling exponent.

Results align with recent GaAs quantum wire experiments.

Abstract

It is shown that the conductance of a weakly disordered Luttinger-liquid quantum wire connected to non-interacting leads is affected by electron-electron interactions in the wire. This is in contrast to the case of a perfect wire the conductance of which is given by $e^2/h$ regardless of interactions in the wire. The disorder-induced correction to the conductance scales with temperature and/or the wire length, the scaling exponent being determined only by the interaction strength in the wire. These results explain recent experiments on quasi-ballistic GaAs quantum wires.