ELECTRIC-FIELD CONDITIONS FOR LANDAUER AND BOLTZMANN-DRUDE CONDUCTANCE EQUATIONS

It is shown explicitly in a unified theory of conductance, for bulk metals and mesoscopic systems, that a Landauer type of conductance equation is compatible with a spatially localized continuous-q-spectrum electric field that is unidirectional, but not with a homogeneous q=0 field. The reverse field condition holds for the Boltzmann-Drude conductance equation for an inhomogeneous bulk metal that has no inelastic scattering. A Feynman-diagram form of Green-function theory shows explicitly the virtual processes and repeated quantum scattering from a single object that occur with Feynman path integrals. The distinction between repeated scattering of current and repeated one-electron scattering is important. For a mesoscopic system, infinite conduction would occur if scattering were to be exactly zero-there is no necessity for postulated contact potentials between lead wires and thermal reservoirs. This is because just in this translationally invariant case a q=0 electric field must occur, and for this the Landauer equation must be replaced by the Boltzmann-Drude equation with zero scattering. In contrast to the strong frequency dependence of the Boltzmann-Drude equation, it is shown that no frequency dependence of the conductance occurs in the Landauer type of equation for frequencies much smaller than the inverse of the electron transit time across the electric-field region.