Transport properties of partially equilibrated quantum wires

Tobias Micklitz, Jérôme Rech, K. A. Matveev

Published 2009-10-18Version 1

We study the effect of thermal equilibration on the transport properties of a weakly interacting one-dimensional electron system. Although equilibration is severely suppressed due to phase-space restrictions and conservation laws, it can lead to intriguing signatures in partially equilibrated quantum wires. We consider an ideal homogeneous quantum wire. We find a finite temperature correction to the quantized conductance, which for a short wire scales with its length, but saturates to a length-independent value once the wire becomes exponentially long. We also discuss thermoelectric properties of long quantum wires. We show that the uniform quantum wire is a perfect thermoelectric refrigerator, approaching Carnot efficiency with increasing wire length.