General method for calculating the universal conductance of strongly correlated junctions of multiple quantum wires

Abstract

We develop a method to extract the universal conductance of junctions of multiple quantum wires, a property of systems connected to reservoirs, from static ground-state computations in closed finite systems. The method is based on a key relationship, derived within the framework of boundary conformal field theory, between the conductance tensor and certain ground state correlation functions. Our results provide a systematic way of studying quantum transport in the presence of strong electron-electron interactions using efficient numerical techniques such as the standard time-independent density-matrix renormalization-group method. We give a step-by-step recipe for applying the method and present several tests and benchmarks. As an application of the method, we calculate the conductance of the M fixed point of a Y junction of Luttinger liquids for several values of the Luttinger parameter $g$ and conjecture its functional dependence on $g$.

27 pages, 28 figures, published version