Interplay of size and Landau quantizations in the de Haas–van Alphen oscillations of metallic nanowires

Abstract

We examine the interplay between size quantization and Landau quantization in the de Haas–van Alphen oscillations of clean metallic nanowires in a longitudinal magnetic field for “hard” boundary conditions, i.e., those of an infinite round well, as opposed to the “soft” parabolically confined boundary conditions previously treated in Alexandrov and Kabanov AK Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 076601 2005 . We find that there exist two fundamental frequencies as opposed to the one found in bulk systems and the three frequencies found by AK with soft boundary counditions. In addition, we find that the additional “magic resonances” of AK may also be observed in the infinite well case, though they are now damped. We also compare the numerically generated energy spectrum of the infinite well potential with that of our analytic approximation, and compare calculations of the oscillatory portions of the thermodynamic quantities for both models.