Transport and Dissipation in Quantum Pumps

Abstract

This paper is about adiabatic transport in quantum pumps. The notion of ``energy shift'', a self-adjoint operator dual to the Wigner time delay, plays a role in our approach: It determines the current, the dissipation, the noise and the entropy currents in quantum pumps. We discuss the geometric and topological content of adiabatic transport and show that the mechanism of Thouless and Niu for quantized transport via Chern numbers cannot be realized in quantum pumps where Chern numbers necessarily vanish.