  Motivated by the recent developments in fermionic cold atoms and in
nanostructured systems, we propose the model of a peristaltic quantum pump.
Differently from the Thouless paradigm, a peristaltic pump is a quantum device
that generates a particle flux as the effect of a sliding finite-size
microlattice. A one-dimensional tight-binding Hamiltonian model of this quantum
machine is formulated and analyzed within a lattice Green's function formalism
on the Keldysh contour. The pump observables, as e.g. the pumped particles per
cycle, are studied as a function of the pumping frequency, the width of the
pumping potential, the particles mean free path and system temperature. The
proposed analysis applies to arbitrary peristaltic potentials acting on
fermionic quantum fluids confined to one dimension. These confinement
conditions can be realized in nanostructured systems or, in a more controllable
way, in cold atoms experiments. In view of the validation of the theoretical
results, we describe the outcomes of the model considering a fermionic cold
atoms system as a paradigmatic example.
