Nonlinear Sigma Model for Normal and Superconducting Systems: A Pedestrian Approach

The nonlinear sigma model (NLSM) epitomises a field-theoretical approach to (interacting) electrons in disordered media. These lectures are aimed at the audience who might have vaguely heard about its existence but know very little of what is that, even less so of why it should be used and next to nothing of how it can be applied. These what, why and mainly how are the subject of the present lectures. In the first part, after a short description of why to be bothered, the NLSM is derived from scratch in a relatively simple (but still rather mathematical) way for non-interacting electrons in the presence of disorder, and some illustration of its perturbative usage is given. In the second part it is generalised, not without some leap of faith, to include the Coulomb repulsion and superconducting pairing.Comment: 21 pages, 5 eps figures. To appear in "Proceedings of the International School of Physics "Enrico Fermi" Course CLI, edited by B. Altshuler and V. Tognetti, IOS Press, Amsterdam 200

One-Dimensional Transport of Ultracold Bosons

Advances in cooling and trapping of atoms have enabled unprecedented experimental control of many-body quantum systems. This led to the observation of numerous quantum phenomena, important for fundamental science, indispensable for high-precision simulations of condensed-matter systems and promising for technological applications. However, transport measurements in neutral quantum gases are still in their infancy in contrast to the central role they play in electronics. In these lectures, after reviewing nascent experiments on quantum fermionic transport, I will focus on our theoretical prediction sand the possibility of experimental observations of qualitatively new phenomena in transport of ultracold bosons which do not have a direct counterpart in quantum electronic transport in condensed matter systems. The description of this transport is based on the Luttinger liquid (LL) theory. So in the first part of the lectures I will introduce main concepts of the LL based on the functional bosonisation approach.Comment: Lecture notes for 13th International School on Theoretical Physics "Symmetry and Structural Properties of Condensed Matter", Sep 2018, Rzesz\'ow, Polan

Low temperature decoherence and relaxation in charge Josephson-junction qubits

In this lectures, we have described some essential features of loss of coherence by a qubit coupled to the environment. We have first presented well known semiclassical arguments that relate both decoherence and relaxation to the environmental noise. Then we have shown that models with pure decoherence (but no relaxation in qubit states) can be exactly solvable. As an example, we have treated in detail the model of fluctuating background charges which is believed to describe one of the most important channels for decoherence for the charge Josephson junction qubit. We have shown that the decoherence rate saturates at `high' temperatures while becoming linear in T at low temperatures and showing in all regimes a non-monotonic behaviour as a function of the coupling of the qubit to the fluctuating background charges. We have also considered, albeit only perturbatively, the qubit relaxation by the background charges and demonstrated that a quasi-linear behaviour of the spectral density of noise deduced from the measurements of the relaxation rate can be qualitatively explained.Comment: Lecture notes for International workshop on mesoscopic and nanoscopic systems, Kolkata, India, February 2006, to be published by Springe

Low-Temperature Decoherence of Qubit Coupled to Background Charges

We have found an exact expression for the decoherence rate of a Josephson charge qubit coupled to fluctuating background charges. At low temperatures $T$ the decoherence rate ${\Gamma}$ is linear in $T$ while at high temperatures it saturates in agreement with a known classical solution which, however, reached at surprisingly high $T$. In contrast to the classical picture, impurity states spread in a wide interval of energies ($\gg T$) may essentially contribute to ${\Gamma}$.Comment: Both figures are changed to illustrate a more generic case of impurity states spread in wide interval of energies. Some changes have been made to the abstract and the introductio

Local impurity in a multichannel Luttinger liquid

We investigate the stability of conducting and insulating phases in multichannel Luttinger liquids with respect to embedding a single impurity. We devise a general approach for finding critical exponents of the conductance in the limits of both weak and strong scattering. In contrast to the one-channel Luttinger liquid, the system state in certain parametric regions depends on the scattering strength which results in the emergence of a bistability. Focusing on the two-channel liquid, the method developed here enables us to provide a generic analysis of phase boundaries governed by the most relevant (i.e., not necessarily single-particle) scattering mechanism. The present approach is applicable to channels of different nature as in fermion-boson mixtures, or to identical ones as on the opposite edges of a topological insulator. We show that interaction per se cannot provide protection in the particular case of topological insulators realized in narrow Hall bars

Impurity Scattering in Luttinger Liquid with Electron-Phonon Coupling

We study the influence of electron-phonon coupling on electron transport through a Luttinger liquid with an embedded weak scatterer or weak link. We derive the renormalization group (RG) equations which indicate that the directions of RG flows can change upon varying either the relative strength of the electron-electron and electron-phonon coupling or the ratio of Fermi to sound velocities. This results in the rich phase diagram with up to three fixed points: an unstable one with a finite value of conductance and two stable ones, corresponding to an ideal metal or insulator.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

SPECTRAL CORRELATIONS IN DISORDERED ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS: CROSSOVER FROM METAL TO INSULATOR REGIME

We use the semiclassical approach combined with the scaling results for the diffusion coefficient to consider the two-level correlation function $R(\varepsilon)$ for a disordered electron system in the crossover region, characterized by the appearance of a macroscopic correlation or localization length, $\xi$, that diverges at the metal-insulator transition. We show new critical statistics, characterized by a nontrivial asymptotic behavior of $R(\varepsilon)$, to emerge on both sides of the transition at higher energies, and to expand to all energies larger than mean level spacing when $\xi$ exceeds the system size.Comment: 4 pages,1 figure, in self-ectracting uuencoded gz-compressed file to be published in Phys. Rev. Letters; REVTeX source file is available upon reques