Integrable Impurities as Boundary Conditions

Marion Moliner, Peter Schmitteckert

Published 2011-06-22, updated 2011-11-17Version 2

A few exactly solvable interacting quantum many-body problems with impurities were previously reported to exhibit unusual features such as non-localization and absence of backscattering. In this work we consider the use of these integrable impurities as boundary conditions in the framework of linear transport problems. We first show that such impurities enhance the density of states at the Fermi surface, thus increasing the effective system size. The study of the real time-dynamics of a wave packet sent through a series of them inserted in both non-interacting and interacting leads then indicates that these impurities are transparent and do not add artefacts to the measurement of transport properties. We finally apply these new boundary conditions to study the conductance of an interacting scatterer using the embedding method.