English

Influence Functional for Decoherence of Interacting Electrons in Disordered Conductors

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks 2015-06-25 v2 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

We have rederived the controversial influence functional approach of Golubev and Zaikin (GZ) for interacting electrons in disordered metals in a way that allows us to show its equivalence, before disorder averaging, to diagrammatic Keldysh perturbation theory. By representing a certain Pauli factor (1-2 rho) occuring in GZ's effective action in the frequency domain (instead of the time domain, as GZ do), we also achieve a more accurate treatment of recoil effects. With this change, GZ's approach reproduces, in a remarkably simple way, the standard, generally accepted result for the decoherence rate. -- The main text and appendix A.1 to A.3 of the present paper have already been published previously; for convenience, they are included here again, together with five additional, lengthy appendices containing relevant technical details.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0510563,
  title  = {Influence Functional for Decoherence of Interacting Electrons in Disordered Conductors},
  author = {Jan von Delft},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0510563},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

Final version, as submitted to IJMPB. 106 pages, 11 figures. First 16 pages contain summary of main results. Appendix A summarizes key technical steps, with a new section A.4 on "Perturbative vs. Nonperturbative Methods". Appendix C.4 on thermal weighting has been extended to include discussion [see Eqs.(C.22-24)] of average energy of electron trajectories