Admittance of planar two-terminal quantum systems

Abstract

We develop an approach to calculate the admittance of effectively one-dimensional open quantum systems in random phase approximation. The stationary, unperturbed system is described within the Landauer-B\"uttiker formalism taking into account the Coulomb interaction in the Hartree approximation. The dynamic changes in the effective potential are calculated microscopically from the charge-charge correlation function resulting from the stationary scattering states. We provide explicit RPA-expressions for the quantum admittance. As a first example the case of a quantum capacitor is considered where we can derive a small-frequency expansion for the admittance which lends itself to an experimental testing of the theory. A comparison of the low-frequency expansion with the complete RPA-expression shows that for a quantum capacitor a simple classical equivalent circuit with frequency-independent elements does not describe satisfactorily the quantum-admittance with increasing the frequency.