Unusual temperature dependent resistivity of a semiconductor quantum wire

TL;DR

This paper investigates the unusual temperature-dependent resistivity in a GaAs quantum wire, revealing that many-body effects significantly alter the low-temperature behavior from expected models.

Contribution

It demonstrates that many-body electron-phonon interactions drastically change the low-temperature resistivity behavior in semiconductor quantum wires, deviating from traditional theories.

Findings

Resistivity shows low-temperature activated behavior under classical models.

Many-body effects induce a power-law temperature dependence at low temperatures.

Quantum wire resistivity behavior differs markedly from higher-dimensional systems.

Abstract

We calculate the electronic resistivity of a GaAs-based semiconductor quantum wire in the presence of acoustic phonon scattering. We find that the usual Drude-Boltzmann transport theory leads to a low temperature activated behavior instead of the well-known Bloch-Gr\"uneisen power law. Many-body electron-phonon renormalization, which is entirely negligible in higher dimensional systems, has a dramatic effect on the low temperature quantum wire transport properties as it qualitatively modifies the temperature dependence of the resistivity from the exponentially activated behavior to an approximate power law behavior at sufficiently low temperatures.