Transport properties of a Luttinger liquid in the presence of several time-dependent impurities

Abstract

We study the transport properties of a Luttinger liquid in the presence of several time-dependent weak point-like impurities. Our starting point is the bosonized form of the Luttinger liquid Hamiltonian with a potential introduced by the impurities. We find the correction to the total current due to the backscattering of the electrons by the impurities in first order of perturbation theory for a general time-dependent impurity potential. We then apply this result to a single time-dependent impurity, and show that it reproduces the result obtained by Feldman and Gefen in Ref. [7], in particular that the current enhancement occurs only for strong repulsive electron-electron interactions. For the case of two impurities oscillating with the same frequency, we find a novel effect, namely, that the dc-component of the backscattering current is positive {\it even for weak repulsive interactions}, due to the presence of the interference term induced by spatial correlations in the Luttinger liquid. We show that the impurity frequencies at which the enhancement takes place form a band-like structure. In the case of several impurities, the bands become broader, because of interference effects.