2008/07/03 by N. Romero Kalmanovitz, Kalmanovitz, N. Romero, A. A. Bykov +5
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #FOS: Physical sciences #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0807.0601
5 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2008/07/03 · openalex publication_date 2008/07/03 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2017/05/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Warming in complex physical systems, in particular global warming, attracts significant contemporary interest. It is essential, therefore, to understand basic physical mechanisms leading to overheating. It is well known that application of an electric field to conductors heats electric charge carriers. Often an elevated electron temperature describes the result of the heating. This paper demonstrates that an electric field applied to a conductor with discrete electron spectrum produces a non-equilibrium electron distribution, which cannot be described by temperature. Such electron distribution changes dramatically the conductivity of highly mobile two dimensional electrons in a magnetic field, forcing them into a state with a zero differential resistance. Most importantly the results demonstrate that, in general, the effective overheating in the systems with discrete spectrum is significantly stronger than the one in systems with continuous and homogeneous distribution of the energy levels at the same input power.