CURRENT PARTITION IN MULTIPROBE CONDUCTORS IN THE PRESENCE OF SLOWLY OSCILLATING EXTERNAL POTENTIALS

In the presence of a static potential drop a carrier stream incident at a contact of the sample is partitioned into the other contacts according to the transmission probabilities of the sample. The bare response to oscillating potentials, on the other hand, violates current conservation due to the piling up of unscreened charges in the sample, and has to be modified by taking the induced screening potential into account. We present a novel derivation of the conductance response to oscillating external chemical potentials, find the response to an arbitrary internal potential in terms of functional derivatives with respect to the local potential of the scattering matrix of the conductor, and determine the screening potential for slowly oscillating potentials from the condition of local charge neutrality. We find that the current partitioning depends on ratios of local densities of states which reflect the injection and emission properties of the contacts of the sample.