Future Trends in Microelectronics: Up the Nano Creek

Fermi Liquid Behavior of GaAs Quantum Wires

E. Levy, A. Tsukernik, M. Karpovski, A. Palevski

School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel

B. Dwir, E. Pelucchi, A. Rudra, E. Kapon

Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL)CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

Y. Oreg

Dept. of Condensed Matter PhysicsThe Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel

1.   Introduction

The electrical conductance through noninteracting clean quantum wires containing a number of one-dimensional subbands is quantized in the universal units 2e²/h.^1,2 As the number of the subbands is changed, the conductance varies in a step-like manner (with the plateaus at integer values of the universal unit), as was observed in narrow constrictions in 2D electron gas (2DEG) system.^3,4 Typically, the size of the constrictions is comparable to the Fermi length λ_F, and is much shorter than the mean free path in the 2DEG. For such short and clean narrow wires, the electron-electron interactions described by the so-called Luttinger liquid (LL) model⁵ do not affect the value of the conductance, namely it is temperature and length independent, as indeed was shown experimentally.^3,4 In the presence of disorder suppression of the conductance is expected at low temperatures in sufficiently long quantum wires (QWRs) containing at least a few electrons. A number of theoretical papers^6-9 predicted a negative correction to the conductance temperature dependence G(T), which obeys a T^g-1 power law, ...