2002/05/13 by P. Mohanty
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.mes-hall #quant-ph
published as Published in "Complexity from Microscopic to Macroscopic Scales: Coherence and Large deviations", Edited by A.T. Skjeltorp and T. Vicsek (Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2001) · 34 pages, 19 figures; Invited lecture at the NATO Advanced Study Institute in Geilo, Norway (2001)
arxiv created 2002/05/13 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
This lecture note reviews a variety of transport and thermodynamic measurements of electron decoherence time in low-dimensional conductors at low temperature. The mechanism of dephasing by electron interaction mediated by an arbitrarily small number of magnetic impurities is neither applicable to our linear-response measurements of weak localization, nor is it observed in the recent high-field measurements of the decoherence time in nominally pure quasi-one dimensional gold wires. The source of decoherence, after extensive experiments, still appears to be intrinsic.