Spin current in an electron waveguide tunnel-coupled to a topological insulator

We show that electron tunneling from edge states in a two-dimensional topological insulator into a parallel electron waveguide leads to the appearance of spin-polarized current in the waveguide. The spin polarization P can be very close to unity and the electron current passing through the tunnel contact splits in the waveguide into two branches flowing from the contact. The polarization essentially depends on the electron scattering by the contact and the electron-electron interaction in the one-dimensional edge states. The electron-electron interaction is treated within the Luttinger liquid model. The main effect of the interaction stems from the renormalization of the electron velocity, due to which the polarization increases with the interaction strength. Electron scattering by the contact leads to a decrease in P. A specific effect occurs when the bottom of the subbands in the waveguide crosses the Dirac point of the spectrum of edge states when changing the voltage or chemical potential. This leads to changing the direction of the spin current.     

单壁碳纳米管微分电导在高压和强磁场下的实验研究

单壁碳纳米管在高压下会发生结构相变，导致金属型的碳纳米管变成半导体.相变后碳纳米管中电子的库仑关联的表现形式发生变化，从Luttinger liquid行为转变成环境量子涨落行为.同时，相变后电子波函数的相位关联导致弱局域化行为的出现.为了研究库仑关联和相位关联之间是否有相互影响，使用金刚石对顶砧和液压自锁高压包在0—10 GPa准静压范围内测量了单层碳纳米管样品在低温和不同磁场下的微分电导随偏压的依赖关系.实验结果表明，相位关联和库仑关联是两种独立的效应，各自影响着电子的输运行为. 关键词： 单层碳纳米管 高压 微分电导     

Antiresonance Effect in Electronic Tunnelling through a One-Dimensional Quantum Dot Chain

Electronic tunnelling through a one-dimensional quantum dot chain is theoretically studied, when two leads couple to the individual component quantum dots of the chain arbitrarily. If there are some dangling quantum dots in the chain outside the leads, the electron tunnelling through the quantum dot chain is wholly forbidden while the energy of the incident electron is just equal to the molecular energy levels of the dangling quantum dots, which is known as the antiresonance effect. In addition, the influence of electron interaction on the antiresonance effect is discussed within the Hartree-Fock approximation.     

Quantum entanglement in an interacting electron gas

The entanglement between two electrons in a degenerate electron gas is studied as a function of their separation. We have taken into account the screened Coulomb interaction between electrons. It is found that interaction leads to a suppression of the entanglement distance. The interaction leads also to a direct dependence of entanglement distance on density.     

Reprint of : Regular and singular Fermi liquid in triple quantum dots: Coherent transport studies

A system of three coupled quantum dots in a triangular geometry (TQD) with electron–electron interaction and symmetrically coupled to two leads is analyzed with respect to the electron transport by means of the numerical renormalization group. Varying gate potentials this system exhibits extremely rich range of regimes with different many-electron states with various local spin orderings. It is demonstrated how the Luttinger phase changes in a controlled manner which then via the Friedel sum rule formula exactly reproduces the conductance through the TQD system. The analysis of the uncoupled TQD molecule from the leads gives a reliable qualitative understanding of various relevant regimes and an insight into the phase diagram with the regular Fermi liquid and singular-Fermi liquid phases.     

Extraordinary electron transmission through a periodic array of quantum dots

We study electron transmission through a periodic array of quantum dots (QD) sandwiched between doped semiconductor leads. When the Fermi wavelength of tunneling electron exceeds the array lattice constant, the off-resonant per QD conductance is enhanced by several orders of magnitude relative to the single-QD conductance. The physical mechanism of the enhancement is delocalization of a small fraction of system eigenstates caused by coherent coupling of QDs via the electron continuum in the leads.     

Surface energy modification by electron beam

We observe a pronounced variation of wettability properties in solid state materials induced by a low-energy electron beam. The phenomenon occurs in several stages characterized by various mechanisms. We show that for low electron doses the irradiation leads to decrease in the wetting of a dielectric surface due to induced surface electric potential. The higher electron charge leads to formation of a chemical monolayer on material’s surface. It has been found that the electron irradiation strongly modifies the surface free energy of SiO₂ by decreasing its total surface free energy value, almost twice. However, electron-induced variations of dispersive and polar components of the surface free energy are quite different and depend of incident electron charge.     

Low-energy electron-induced reactions in thin films of glucose and N-acetyl-glucosamine

Reactions induced in thin films of α-d-glucose and N-acetylglucosamine by low-energy electron exposure at incident electron energies (E₀) between 5 eV and 15 eV have been investigated by high-resolution electron energy loss spectroscopy (HREELS). The reactions of α-d-glucose upon electron exposure were also studied in the presence of molecular oxygen. Electron exposure leads to characteristic changes of the vibrational spectra indicating that OH groups are lost with the formation of CC double bonds taking place preferentially above the ionisation threshold of the investigated molecules. At lower E₀, OH groups are equally decomposed suggesting that dissociative electron attachment contributes to the reactions but formation of double bonds is not observed. The results show that different reaction channels are effective depending on E₀ and that the outcome of electron-driven chemistry in saccharides may be controlled by changing from the subionisation regime to E₀ above the ionisation threshold. Generally, low-energy electron exposure in the absence of O₂ produces a material with lower oxygen content, i.e. leads to a reduction of the saccharide. In the case of N-acetylglucosamine, removal of the amide group from the sugar is also important at subionisation energies. In contrast, as shown for α-d-glucose, low-energy electron exposure in the presence of O₂ leads to oxidation of the sugar even at cryogenic temperature.     

Contact conductance between graphene and quantum wires

The contact conductance between graphene and two quantum wires which serve as the leads to connect graphene and electron reservoirs is theoretically studied. Our investigation indicates that the contact conductance depends sensitively on the graphene-lead coupling configuration. When each quantum wire couples solely to one carbon atom, the contact conductance vanishes at the Dirac point if the two carbon atoms coupling to the two leads belong to the same sublattice of graphene. We find that such a feature arises from the chirality of the Dirac electron in graphene. Such a chirality associated with conductance zero disappears when a quantum wire couples to multiple carbon atoms. The general result irrelevant to the coupling configuration is that the contact conductance decays rapidly with the increase of the distance between the two leads. In addition, in the weak graphene-lead coupling limit, when the distance between the two leads is much larger than the size of the graphene-lead contact areas and the incident electron energy is close to the Dirac point, the contact conductance is proportional to the square of the product of the two graphene-lead contact areas, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the two leads.     

Gapless Chiral Superconducting ( d + id )-Wave Phase in Strongly Correlated Layered Material with a Triangular Lattice

It is shown that interlayer electron tunneling in the quasi-two-dimensional ensemble of Hubbard fermions leads to the realization of the gapless superconducting phase with the chiral (d + id)-wave order parameter symmetry, not for a single value of sodium ion concentration, but in a wide range of concentrations. Precisely this situation corresponds to experimental data on the layered sodium cobaltite intercalated by water (NaxCoO2 ⋅ yH2O). Intra-atomic electron repulsion that determines the strong electron correlation regime leads to the representation of Hubbard fermions, the interaction of which ensures Cooper instability. Intersite intralayer interactions between fermions considerably affect the positions of nodal points of the chiral order parameter and change the critical concentration at which a topological transition occurs in the 2D system of Hubbard fermions.     

Magnetic switching and spin filtering in an edge-state device based on HgTe waveguides

We investigate theoretically the edge channel transport in a HgTe waveguide modulated bytwo magnetic barriers. For an electron incident from a quantum-spin-Hall state in leads,the transmission can depend strongly on the relative orientation (parallel orantiparallel) of the two magnetic barriers as its energy is near the bulk conduction bandof leads. For the antiparallel configuration, the transmission is spin-independent and canbe suppressed drastically. For the parallel configuration, the electron can transmitnearly perfectly for a proper spin orientation. This contrast in transmission indicatesthat the proposed edge-state device may serve as a magnetic switch and a spin filter.     

A study of density in electron-cyclotron-resonance plasma

A theory is developed for the density profile of low temperature plasmas confined by applied magnetic field and an experiment of the electron-cyclotron-resonance (ECR) plasma is conducted to compare the theoretical prediction and experimental measurements. Due to a large electron mobility along the magnetic field, electrons move quickly out of the system, leaving ions behind and building a space charge potential, which leads to the ambipolar diffusion of ions. In a steady-state condition, the plasma generation by ionization of neutral molecules is in balance with plasma loss due to the diffusion, leading to the electron temperature equation, which is expressed in terms of the plasma size, chamber pressure, and the ionization energy and cross section of neutrals. The power balance condition leads to the plasma density equation, which is also expressed in terms of the electron temperature, the input microwave power and the chamber pressure. It is shown that the plasma density increases, reaches its peak and decreases, as the chamber pressure increases from a small value (0.1 mTorr). These simple expressions of electron temperature and density provide a scaling law of ECR plasma in terms of system parameters. After carrying out an experimental observation, it is concluded that the theoretical predictions of the electron temperature and plasma density agree remarkably well with experimental data     

Effect of scattering processes on the dynamics of electrons in narrow energy bands

We have investigated the effect of a magnetic field and the degree of filling and width of the band on the scattering processes on the basis of the Hubbard method. The electrical conductivity tensor was calculated with account taken of damping processes. It is shown that the relaxation times depend essentially on the electron spin orientations. Theordering of the electron spins under the influence of the external magnetic field leads to an increase of the electrical conductivity tensor, that in turn leads to a negative magnetoresistance.Translated from Izvestiya Vysshikh Uchebnykh Zavedenii, Fizika, No. 6, pp. 65–69, June, 1976.     

The pairing of electronic states in alternant hydrocarbons

The pairing of Hückel molecular orbitals in an alternant hydrocarbon holds in a more general sense for wave functions which make complete allowance for the correlation of π electrons within the atomic orbital scheme. The new pairing property holds exactly in the scope of Pariser, Parr, and Pople's approximations, and leads to an exact correspondence between every detail of the excited states, the electronic spectra and electron resonance spectra of positive and negative hydrocarbon ions. Neutral molecules have a half-filled electron shell in which electrons and holes are on an equal footing. This causes the electron distribution to be uniform in every electronic state, and leads to two kinds of excited state—‘even’ and ‘odd’—as Pariser first suggested. Transitions between states of the same parity are forbidden. In neutral radicals the spin density vanishes in all the bonds, and in both radicals and molecules the bond orders vanish between atoms of the same set (starred or unstarred).     

On the Possibility of Superconductivity in Bilayer Heterostructures

A model is created for bilayer heterostructures in a strong magnetic field which makes it possible to neglect the Coulomb interaction. The thermodynamic instability of states of the electron system in a strong magnetic field leads to the formation of a periodic vortex lattice. The case is considered where the electron density is close to the density of the half-filled Landau level. An electron spectrum is found and an analog of the Cooper effect appearing under the Bogoliubov canonical transformation for electron Fermi operators is studied.     

Quantum teleportation by particle-hole annihilation in the Fermi sea

We point out that the mutual annihilation of an electron-hole pair at a tunnel barrier leads to teleportation of the state of the annihilated electron to a second, distant electron--if the latter was previously entangled with the annihilated hole. We propose an experiment, involving low-frequency noise measurements on a two-dimensional electron gas in a high magnetic field, to detect teleportation of electrons and holes in the two lowest Landau levels.     

Intramolecular electron scattering and electron transfer following autoionization in dissociating molecules

Resonant Auger decay of core-excited molecules during ultrafast dissociation leads to a Doppler shift of the emitted electrons depending on the direction of the electron emission relative to the dissociation axis. We have investigated this process by angle-resolved electron-fragment ion coincidence spectroscopy. Electron energy spectra for selected emission angles for the electron relative to the molecular axis reveal the occurrence of intermolecular electron scattering and electron transfer following the primary emission. These processes amount to approximately 25% of the resonant atomic Auger intensity emitted in the studied transition.     

长程电子关联对聚噻吩中极化子的影响

采用扩展的SSH模型,加上电子相互作用和长程电子关联,用自洽迭代的方法研究了聚噻吩链中的极化子问题,计算了电子相互作用和长程电子关联对极化子位形和电荷密度的影响,获得了长程电子关联使极化子位形变小,极化子区域变窄,电荷密度震荡减弱,对聚合物中电子的输运的影响不能忽略的有益结果.     

Kondo effect of a quantum dot coupling indirectly to the conduction electrons

When a quantum dot in the Kondo regime couples to two leads (the conduction electron reservoirs) indirectly through intermediate electron levels, two features are noteworthy concerning the Kondo effect. First, the Kondo peak in the spectrum of local density of states becomes narrower as the coupling to the leads is much larger than the interdot coupling, which is just opposite to the case of direct dot-lead coupling. Secondly, the increment of the coupling to the leads and the deviation of the intermediate levels from the Fermi level can effectively facilitate the formation of the negative differential conductance.     

Pure spin photocurrents in low-dimensional structures

As is well known, the absorption of circularly polarized light in semiconductors results in optical orientation of electron spins and helicity-dependent electric photocurrent, and the absorption of linearly polarized light is accompanied by optical alignment of electron momenta. Here, we show that the absorption of unpolarized light leads to the generation of a pure spin current, although both the average electron spin and electric current vanish. We demonstrate this for direct interband and intersubband as well as indirect intraband (Drude-like) optical transitions in semiconductor quantum wells.