Crossover from Fermi liquid to multichannel Luttinger liquid in high-mobility quantum wires

We investigate the electrical conductance of long, high-mobility quantum wires formed by the split-gate technique, which allows for adjustment of the wire width and the number of one-dimensional electron subbands, n. In wires with 3≤n≤8, a logarithmic temperature dependence of the conductance is observed for 1<T<10K, which reaches as much as 30% of the Drude conductance. In even narrower wires, the logarithmic dependence changes to a power-law variation. Our observations are shown to be in good agreement with recent theoretical studies, which attribute the logarithmic term to interaction effects in a weakly disordered quasi-one-dimensional conductor. This interaction correction is associated with the emergence of a crossover from a quasi-one-dimensional weakly disordered Fermi liquid to a multichannel Luttinger liquid.