Seminar by Igor Lerner

Metal-insulator transition in a single-impurity 1D wire with electron-phonon coupling

We study influence of electron-phonon coupling on electron transport through a 1D wire with an embedded impurity. In the absence of this coupling, a single impurity with any scattering strength kills low-temperature dc conductance through the wire with a repulsive interaction between electrons. We show that in the presence of the coupling, such a system either remains an insulator or becomes an ideal 1D conductor at any scattering strength provided that electron and phonon scatterings from the impurity are uncorrelated. However for the correlated scatterings the system may undergo a metal-insulator transition at some intermediate value of the scattering amplitude.