# Comment on “Friedel phases and phases of transmission amplitudes in quantum scattering systems” by T. Taniguchi and M. Büttiker

## Abstract

We take a modified boundary condition at the dead end of a stub to simulate transmission zeroes being replaced by minima and then the discontinuous phase slip (or decrease) at the transmission zeroes are replaced by a continuous but rapid phase slip. The modified boundary condition can be continuously tuned to give the results of the stub with hard wall boundary condition at the dead end of stub. Even when the phase slip is continuous one can obtain information about the density of states in the stub region from the scattering phases.

PACS numbers: 72.10.-d; 73.20.Dx

Transport across the stub structure has acquired a lot of importance recently . The stub structure can exhibit transmission zeroes at certain Fermi energies  and there is a discontinuous slip (or decrease) in the phase of the transmission amplitude as the Fermi energy crosses this transmission zero . Recently it was shown  that if one subtracts this discontinuous phase slip from the phase of the transmission amplitude then the remaining phase (which they term Friedel phase) satisfy the Friedel sum rule . All these analysis are based on calculations with a hard wall boundary condition (an infinite barrier potential or an infinite well potential) at the dead end of the stub. However, in realistic situations one may not find absolutely discontinuous phase slip over zero energy scale. In this comment we find a simple way to simulate the fact that this phase slip can be continuous but rapid. An infinite potential well at the dead end of the stub reflects an incident electron with unit probability. Now a small perturbation from this would be a finite but very deep potential well at the dead end of the stub. This simulates the fact that electrons are almost entirely reflected from the end of the stub (a negligible amount escapes), transmission zeroes are replaced by minima (a similar situation was pointed out to me by A. M. Jayannavar ) and here we show that the discontinuous phase slip at the transmission zero is then replaced by a continuous but rapid slip in phase.

In Fig. 1 we show the transmission coefficient $`T`$ versus $`kL`$ across the modified stub whose length $`L`$ is normalized to one by choice of the unit of length, by solid curve. The dotted curve gives the phase of the transmission amplitude $`\theta _t`$ . Here $`k`$ is incident wave vector. The transmission coefficient does not exhibit zeroes and the phase of the transmission amplitude rapidly decreases at the minima. However we show that the idea put forward by Taniguchi and Büttiker in Ref.  can be extended to get information about density of states from the scattering phase and in the limit when the potential well at the end of the stub becomes infinite one can recover their results. For this it is not necessary to define a Friedel phase but one has to take into account the fact that for hard wall boundary condition at the dead end of the stub we can write $`d\theta _r/d(kL)=d\theta _t/d(kL)=\rho =\mathrm{\Sigma }|\psi _\mu |^2`$ where $`\psi _\mu `$ is the wavefunction inside the stub and $`\theta _r`$ is the phase of reflection amplitude. This directly follows from Friedel sum rule. In the inset we show that when $`d\theta _t/d(kL)`$ deviates from $`\rho `$ for the modified stub then $`d\theta _r/d(kL)`$ coincides with it and vice versa. The Gaussian deviations from Friedel sum rule becomes narrower as the potential at the end of the stub becomes deeper. The width of these Gaussian deviations from $`\rho `$ give the scale over which the continuous phase slip occur. In the limit of an infinite well potential these deviations become delta function like as found in Ref.  and shown in Fig. 2.

The purpose of this comment is that there can be situations when the discontinuous phase slip produced by geometric scattering can be continuous and even then there is a way to extend the idea of Taniguchi and Büttiker  although in that case defining a Friedel phase is not easy. It is possible that such situations can be simulated in other ways like a magnetic field in the quasi one dimensional case. General violation of Friedel sum rule, when we consider the scattering phases in all directions is shown elsewhere .

Figure captions

Fig. 1 The solid curve is transmission coefficient T across a modified stub. The dotted curve is the phase of the transmission amplitude $`\theta _t`$ across the stub. At the dead end of the stub there is a potential well of $`VL^2=100`$. Next we make $`VL^2=10^6`$ and in the inset we plot $`d\theta _t/d(kL)`$ (dotted curve), $`d\theta _r/d(kL)`$ (dashed curve) and $`\rho `$ (solid curve). We have chosen $`\mathrm{}=2m=1`$.

Fig. 2 The same as in the inset of Fig. 1 but now $`VL^2=10^{10}`$.