Transport through a single-band wire connected to measuring leads

TL;DR

This paper analyzes electron transport in a one-dimensional interacting wire connected to leads, revealing perfect conductance, partial Andreev reflection, and effects of disorder, using bosonization and renormalization group techniques.

Contribution

It provides a rigorous bosonization-based analysis of transport, including effects of abrupt interaction changes, superconducting tendencies, and disorder, with comparison to experiments.

Findings

Total transmission leads to perfect dc conductance.

Partial Andreev reflection occurs with superconducting tendencies.

Disorder impacts conductance, analyzed via renormalization group.

Abstract

Transport through a one-dimensional wire of interacting electrons connected to semi infinite leads is investigated using a bosonization approach. The dynamic nonlocal conductivity is rigorously expressed in terms of the transmission. For abrupt variations of the interaction parameters at the junctions, an incident electron is transmitted as a sequence of partial charges: the central wire acts as a Fabry-P\'erot resonator. The dc conductance is shown to be given by the total transmission which turns out to be perfect. When the wire has a tendency towards superconducting order, partial Andreev reflection of an incident electron occurs. Finally, we study the role of a weak barrier at one contact or inside the wire by a renormalization group method at finite temperature. We compute the conductance in the presence of localized or extended disorder, and compare our results to recent experiments on quantum wires.