Collective excitations and inelastic Coulomb scattering rate of coupled Q1D electron gases in semiconductor quantum wires

We show that a weak resonant tunneling between two quantum wires leads to a nonlinear wave-vector q dependence of the acoustic plasmon mode at small q. Besides, an extra weak intersubband mode appears. As a consequence of the tunneling effects on the acoustic plasmon mode dispersion, the inelastic Coulomb scattering rate of an injected electron is modified significantly.