Transport suppression in heterostructures driven by an ac gate voltage

Miguel Rey, Michael Strass, Sigmund Kohler, Fernando Sols, Peter Hänggi

Published 2004-12-09, updated 2006-02-02Version 2

We explore the possibility of inducing in heterostructures driven by an ac gate voltage the coherent current suppression recently found for nanoscale conductors in oscillating fields. The destruction of current is fairly independent of the transport voltage, but can be controlled by the driving amplitude and frequency. Within a tight-binding approximation, we obtain analytical results for the average current in the presence of driving. These results are compared against an exact numerical treatment based on a transfer-matrix approach.