Paper detail

Influence of structural deformations on the reentrant conductance feature in semiconducting nanowires

Helical states can be measured through the observation of the reentrant behaviour, which is a dip in the conductance probed in semiconducting nanowires (NWs) with strong spin-orbit coupling (SOC) under the presence of an external perpendicular magnetic field. We investigate the effects of deformations in the electronic transport in NWs considering the coupling between different transverse modes. Within this approach, we show that the dip in the conductance of a NW is affected by the presence of a local constriction. Moreover, we find that the reentrant feature in the conductance can appear in NWs with a local expansion of its radius, even in the absence of SOC and magnetic field. Furthermore, we develop a numerical approach to calculate transport properties, which is able to include the deformation and the coupling among several scattering channels.