Electrical transport in a quantum wire: Influence of one- and two-body interactions

The diffusive and collisional contributions to the dc electric current along a quantum wire, of width much smaller than the mean free path, are evaluated at very low temperatures for impurity scattering. The lateral confinement is modeled with a square or a parabolic well and the vertical one by a triangular well as it occurs in heterostructures. Due to the confinement the motion becomes quasi-one-dimensional and changing the Fermi energy or the width leads to oscillations in the density of states, the scattering rate, and the conductivity. Level broadening is taken into account self-consistently. Finally, the influence of electron-electron interactions, in the presence of impurities, is approximately taken into account by evaluating only the dominant (mainly backscattering) contributions to the conductivity.