On Landauer–Büttiker formalism from a quantum quench

Abstract

We study transport in the free fermionic one-dimensional systems subjected to arbitrary local potentials. The bias needed for the transport is modeled by the initial highly non-equilibrium distribution where only half of the system is populated. Additionally to that, the local potential is also suddenly changed when the transport starts. For such a quench protocol we compute the full counting statistics (FCS) of the number of particles in the initially empty part. In the thermodynamic limit, the FCS can be expressed via the Fredholm determinant with the kernel depending on the scattering data and Jost solutions of the pre-quench and the post-quench potentials. We discuss the large-time asymptotic behavior of the obtained determinant and observe that if two or more bound states are present in the spectrum of the post-quench potential the information about the initial state manifests itself in the persistent oscillations of the FCS. On the contrary, when there are no bound states the asymptotic behavior of the FCS is determined solely by the scattering data of the post-quench potential, which for the current (the first moment) is given by the Landauer–Büttiker formalism. The information about the initial state can be observed only in the transient dynamics.