Evidence of Luttinger liquid behavior in GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wires

Abstract

We present low-temperature measurements of the ballistic transport in high-quality quantum wires. As the Fermi energy is varied, the conductance of these wires exhibits quantized plateaus at values lower than integer multiples of 2e2/h. We observe Luttinger liquid power laws in the temperature dependence of the plateau conductances as well as in the non-linear current–voltage characteristics. From these power laws we extract the Luttinger liquid scaling exponent αN as a function of the Fermi energy and the number of occupied subbands.