Conductance of one-dimensional quantum wires -: art. no. 035313

We discuss the conductance of quantum wires in terms of the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL) theory. We use explicitly the charge fractionalization scheme which results from the chiral symmetry of the model. We suggest that results of the standard two-terminal (2T) conductance measurement depend on the coupling of TLL with the reservoirs and can be interpreted as different boundary conditions at the interfaces. We propose a three-terminal (3T) geometry in which the third contact is connected weakly to the bulk of TLL subjected to a large bias current. We develop a renormalization-group (RG) analysis for this problem by taking explicitly into account the splitting of the injected electronic charge into two chiral irrational charges. We study in the presence of bulk contact the leading-order corrections to the conductance for two different boundary conditions, which reproduce in the absence of bulk contact, respectively, the standard 2T source-drain (SD) conductance G(SD)((2))=e(2)/h and G(SD)((2))=ge(2)/h, where g is the TLL charge interaction parameter. We find that under these two boundary conditions for the end contacts the 3T SD conductance G(SD)((3)) shows an UV-relevant deviation from the above two values, suggesting new fixed points in the Ohmic limit. Nontrivial scaling exponents are predicted as a result of electron fractionalization.