Quantum screening effects in driven mesoscopic conductors

  • Microsoft Teams - Seminars@DIFI - cod. hzo4tgo
  • Seminario

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Matteo Acciai
Chalmers University of Technology, Goteborg, Sweden

Dettagli

Understanding the fundamental properties of coherent mesoscopic conductors is an important task in view of possible applications (e.g. in the context of nanoscale thermoelectrics where the interplay between quantum physics and thermodynamics is a subject of active research). For a large class of systems, the Landauer-Buttiker theory allows one to extract the transport properties of a mesoscopic coherent conductor once its transmission function is known. This is, in general, also a function of the applied voltage and temperature biases via screening potentials. Such effects, however, only start to appear in the nonlinear transport regime and are difficult to characterize directly from an experiment.

In this talk, I will show how the addition of a capacitively-coupled, time-dependent drive introduces a correction to the standard linear-response thermoelectric coefficients, carrying direct information about the screening effects in the conductor. These corrections can be easily switched on and off by acting on the time-dependent drive, which thus can serve as a control knob to characterize quantum screening effects in the system. An introduction to the extension of the Landauer-Buttiker formalism to time-dependent transport will also be given in the first part of the talk.