Many-body approach to the terahertz response of Wigner molecules in gated nanowire structures

In this article, we describe a numerical many-body approach for the description of the electromagnetic response of discrete one-dimensional electronic nanosystems. This approach is based on a recursive method to construct a subset of relevant Slater determinants as a many-body basis for the considered system. In turn, we employ a generalized Floquet theory to calculate the periodic many-body statistical operator for the system which is subject to a periodic time-dependent Hamiltonian. As an application of this method, we propose a THz probe technique to obtain spatially resolved information about the electronic spectra inside gated nanowires. This spectroscopic approach employs a segmented multigate design for the local detection of quantum transitions between few-electron states. The obtained simulation results for the intraband THz response spectrum show fingerprints for the formation of Wigner molecules inside the nanowire in the long channel limit. © 2008 The American Physical Society.