Bias and temperature dependence of the 0.7 conductance anomaly in quantum point contacts

The 0.7 (2e(2)/h) conductance anomaly is studied in strongly confined, etched GaAs/GaAlAs quantum point contacts, by measuring the differential conductance as a function of source-drain and gate bias as well as a function of temperature. We investigate in detail how, fur a given gate voltage, the differential conductance depends on the finite bias voltage and find a so-called self-gating effect, which we correct for. The 0.7 anomaly at zero bias is found to evolve smoothly into a conductance plateau at 0.85 (2e(2)/h) at finite bias. On varying the gate voltage the transition between the 1.0 and 0.85 (2e(2)/h) plateaus occurs for definite bias voltages, which define a gate-voltage-dependent energy difference Delta. This energy difference is compared with the activation temperature T-a extracted from the experimentally observed activated behavior of the 0.7 anomaly at low bias. We find Delta = k(B)T(a), which lends support to the idea that the conductance anomaly is due to transmission through two conduction channels, of which the one with its subband edge Delta below the chemical potential becomes thermally depopulated as the temperature is increased.