Effect of impurity scattering on the linear and nonlinear conductances of quasi-one-dimensional disordered quantum wires by asymmetrically lateral confinement

Abstract

We have studied the linear conductance and source-drain bias spectroscopies of clean and disordered quantum wires (QWs) against thermal cycling and lateral shifting, which change the impurity configuration. Conductance quantization and the zero bias anomaly (ZBA) are robust in clean QWs. In contrast, disordered QWs show complexities in the ways of conductance resonance, peak splitting and trace crossing in source-drain bias spectroscopies. The experimental results and theoretical predictions are in congruence. Moreover, the resonant state arising from the impurities results in either a single peak or double-splitting peaks in the spectroscopies from the detailed impurity configurations. The resonant splitting peaks are found to influence the ZBA, indicating that a clean QW is crucial for investigating the intrinsic characteristics of the ZBA of QWs.