........ published in NEWSLETTER # 64
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........ published in NEWSLETTER # 64
MESOSCOPIC ELECTRON TRANSPORT
By Professor G. Schoen, University of Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe (Germany)
The major advances in lithographic technology have enabled researchers to fabricate nanometer scale structures with great control and precision. This has created an great interest in the investigation of these "mesoscopic" systems for novel phenomena, especially those relating to electronic transport. Metallic and superconducting tunnel junctions, quantum dots and multi-dot systems in semiconductor heterostructures, as well as semiconductor-superconductor hybrid nanostructures have all been studied for this purpose. The result of this has been the discovery of a variety of new phenomena, including quantum mechanical interference effects, level quantization, and single- electron charging effects, which greatly influence the electron transport in these systems.
Yet, as a consequence of ever-advancing nano-technology and the availability of novel materials, new mesoscopic areas are emerging and evolving. Such areas include scanning-tunneling microscopy studies of few-atom metallic clusters, Kondo-type physics in the transport properties of quantum dots, time-dependent effects, and properties of interacting systems, e.g. of Luttinger liquids. The overall understanding of each one of these subjects is limited. However, with the foundation laid by the studies in the more traditional systems, there is no doubt that these new areas will advance mesoscopic electron transport to a new phenomenological level, both experimentally and theoretically.
The primary goal of the NATO-Advanced Study Institute "Mesoscopic Electron Transport" in Curacao in June/July 1996 and the resulting proceedings (NATO ASI SERIES E345) was to highlight selected areas in the field, to provide a comprehensive review of such systems, and to serve as an introduction to the new and developing areas of mesoscopic electron transport.
The review articles cover the following areas: methods of nano- fabrication; scanning probe techniques and tunnel spectroscopy; transport through few-electron quantum dots and grains and resonant tunneling phenomena; interaction effects as, for instance, in Luttinger liquids; mesoscopic superconductivity, incl. parity effects in superconducting tunnel junctions and mesoscopic proximity effects near normal-superconductor interfaces; time-dependent phenomena noise, and chaos; transport through atomic contacts; quantum optics; and concepts of quantum computation. All articles are written at an introductory level for a wide audience. We hope that they will provide a stimulus for new directions of research in the rapidly evolving field of mesoscopic electron transport.
Reference books: B17, B294, E291, E345