Future Trends in Microelectronics

2.10

Interplay of Coulomb Blockade and Luttinger-Liquid Physics in Disordered 1D InAs Nanowires with Strong Spin–Orbit Coupling

R. Hevroni, V. Shelukhin, M. Karpovski, M. Goldstein, E. Sela, A. Palevski and Hadas Shtrikman

Raymond and Beverly Sackler School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel-Aviv University, Tel Aviv, 69978, Israel

Department of Condensed Matter Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100, Israel

1 Introduction

Ballistic 1D nanowires (NWs) with strong spin–orbit coupling are theoretically predicted¹ to exhibit nonmonotonic (up and down) conductance steps of size G₀ = e²/h as the electron density is varied by the gate voltage V_G. Although many attempts have been made to measure these conductance steps, they have not been observed yet in either InAs or InSb NWs. This indicates that disorder plays an essential role, preventing the motion of the electrons between the contacts from being ballistic. It is well known that in 1D systems, electron–electron interactions, described by the Luttinger-liquid (LL) model, amplify the role of disorder significantly, causing the conductance to vanish at zero temperature even for very weak disorder.² Experimentally, however, the effects of the interactions in NWs with strong spin–orbital scattering have not yet been reported.

In this chapter we report on experimental studies of the Coulomb blockade in disordered InAs NW at low temperatures. We demonstrate that sequential tunneling is strongly affected by electron–electron ...