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5 - Localization and fluctuations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2013

Supriyo Datta
Affiliation:
Purdue University, Indiana
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Summary

According to Ohm's law, the resistance of an array of scatterers increases linearly with the length of the array. This describes real conductors fairly well if the phase-relaxation length is shorter than the distance between successive scatterers. But at low temperatures in low-mobility samples the phase-relaxation length can be much larger than the mean free path. The conductor can then be viewed as a series of phase-coherent units each of which contains many elastic scatterers. Electronic transport within such a phase-coherent unit belongs to the regime of quantum diffusion which has been studied by many authors since the pioneering work of Anderson (P. W. Anderson (1958), Phys. Rev.109, 1492). In this regime, interference between different scatterers leads to a decrease in the conductance. For a coherent conductor having a overall conductance much greater than ~ (e2/h) or 40 μΩ-1, the decrease in the conductance is approximately (e2/h). Such a conductor is said to be in the regime of weak localization (Section 5.2). This effect is easily destroyed by a small magnetic field (typically less than 100 G), so that it can be identified experimentally by its characteristic magnetoresistance (Section 5.3). This is a very important effect, because unlike most other transport phenomena it is sensitive to phase relaxation and not just to momentum relaxation. Indeed the weak localization effect is often used to measure the phase-relaxation length.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

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  • Localization and fluctuations
  • Supriyo Datta, Purdue University, Indiana
  • Book: Electronic Transport in Mesoscopic Systems
  • Online publication: 05 June 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511805776.006
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  • Localization and fluctuations
  • Supriyo Datta, Purdue University, Indiana
  • Book: Electronic Transport in Mesoscopic Systems
  • Online publication: 05 June 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511805776.006
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Localization and fluctuations
  • Supriyo Datta, Purdue University, Indiana
  • Book: Electronic Transport in Mesoscopic Systems
  • Online publication: 05 June 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511805776.006
Available formats
×