2004/02/29 by M. Ferrier, Meydi Ferrier, L. Angers +11 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Semiconductor Quantum Structures and Devices #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.93.246804
published as Physical Review Letters 93 (2004) 246804 · Additional experimental data in version 2
openalex publication_date 2004/12/08 · arxiv created 2005/02/15 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The low temperature magnetoconductance of a large array of quantum coherent loops exhibits Altshuler-Aronov-Spivak oscillations with a periodicity corresponding to 1/2 flux quantum per loop. We show that the measurement of the harmonics content provides an accurate way to determine the electron phase-coherence length L(phi) in units of the lattice length with no adjustable parameters. We use this method to determine L(phi) in a square network realized from a 2D electron gas in a GaAs/GaAlAs heterojunction, with only a few conducting channels. The temperature dependence follows a power law T(-1/3) from 1.3 K to 25 mK with no saturation, as expected for 1D diffusive electronic motion and electron-electron scattering as the main decoherence mechanism.