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 noninteracting 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 ${\mathit{e}}^{2}$/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 quasiballistic GaAs quantum wires.