Roughness scattering induced insulator-metal-insulator transition in a quantum wire

Abstract

We have theoretically investigated the influence of interface roughness scattering on the low temperature mobility of electrons in quantum wires when electrons fill one or many subbands. We find the Drude conductance of the wire with length $\mathcal{L}$ first increases with increasing linear concentration of electrons $\eta$ and then decreases at larger concentrations. For small radius $R$ of the wire with length $\mathcal{L}$ the peak of the conductance $G_{max}$ is below $e^2/h$ so that electrons are localized. The height of this peak grows as a large power of $R$, so that at large $R$ the conductance $G_{max}$ exceeds $e^2/h$ and a window of concentrations with delocalized states (which we call the metallic window) opens around the peak. Thus, we predict an insulator-metal-insulator transition with increasing concentration for large enough $R$. Furthermore, we show that the metallic domain can be sub-divided into three smaller domains: 1) single-subband ballistic conductor, 2) many-subband ballistic conductor 3) diffusive metal, and use our results to estimate the conductance in these domains. Finally we estimate the critical value of $R_c(\mathcal{L})$ at which the metallic window opens for a given length $\mathcal{L}$ and find it to be in reasonable agreement with experiment.

References in corpus (16)

• Signatures of Majorana fermions in hybrid superconductor-semiconductor nanowire devices
• Majorana Fermions and a Topological Phase Transition in Semiconductor-Superconductor Heterostructures
• Helical liquids and Majorana bound states in quantum wires
• Observation of Majorana Fermions in a Nb-InSb Nanowire-Nb Hybrid Quantum Device
• Superconductor-Nanowire Devices from Tunneling to the Multichannel Regime: Zero-Bias Oscillations and Magnetoconductance Crossover
• Spin-orbit qubit in a semiconductor nanowire
• Tunable Supercurrent Through Semiconductor Nanowires
• Diameter-Dependent Electron Mobility of InAs Nanowires
• Zero-Energy Modes from Coalescing Andreev States in a Two-Dimensional Semiconductor-Superconductor Hybrid Platform
• Experimental and materials considerations for the topological superconducting state in electron and hole doped semiconductors: searching for non-Abelian Majorana modes in 1D nanowires and 2D heterostructures
• Towards high mobility InSb nanowire devices
• Diameter-dependent conductance of InAs nanowires
• Observation of Conductance Quantization in InSb Nanowire Networks
• Accumulation, inversion, and depletion layers in SrTiO${}_3$
• Short-range disorder effects on electronic transport in 2D semiconductor structures
• Surface roughness scattering in multisubband accumulation layers

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Effects of gate-induced electric fields on semiconductor Majorana nanowires