Transport in a Luttinger liquid in the presence of a time-dependent impurity - art. no. 125332

We show that the macroscopic current and charge can be formulated as a quan tum-mechanical zero-mode problem. We find that the current is given by the velocity operator of a particle restricted to move around a circle. As an e xplicit example we investigated a Luttinger liquid of length L that is pert urbed by a time-dependent impurity. Using the statistical mechanics of zero modes we computed the nonequilibrium current. In particular we show that i n the low-temperature limit, L-T/L>1, the zero-mode method introduced here becomes essential for computing the current.