Transport through Dirty Luttinger Liquids Connected to Reservoirs

Abstract

It is shown that the conductance of a weakly disordered Luttinger-liquid quantum wire connected to non-interacting leads is affected by electron-electron interactions in the wire. This is in contrast to the case of a perfect wire the conductance of which is given by $e^2/h$ regardless of interactions in the wire. The disorder-induced correction to the conductance scales with temperature and/or the wire length, the scaling exponent being determined only by the interaction strength in the wire. These results explain recent experiments on quasi-ballistic GaAs quantum wires.