Disorder as Origin of Residual Resistance in Nanowires

In this Letter we present conductance histograms built with thousands of conductance curves of simulated nanowires, where the conductance varies due to the change of the Fermi energy. The results show that internal disorder in the nanowire leads to a shift in the conductance peaks in good agreement with experimental results. Our results explain the origin of the residual resistance used in statistical experiments on conductance quantization in order to place the observed peaks at integer values of ${2e}^2/h$.