English

Inelastic electron transport in granular arrays

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2009-11-11 v1

Abstract

Transport properties of granular systems are governed by Coulomb blockade effects caused by the discreteness of the electron charge. We show that, in the limit of vanishing mean level spacing on the grains, the low-temperature behavior of 1d and 2d arrays is insulating at any inter-grain coupling (characterized by a dimensionless conductance g.) In 2d and g>>1, there is a sharp Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless crossover to the conducting phase at a certain temperature, T_{BKT}. These results are obtained by applying an instanton analysis to map the conventional `phase' description of granular arrays onto the dual `charge' representation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0507695,
  title  = {Inelastic electron transport in granular arrays},
  author = {Alexander Altland and Leonid I. Glazman and Alex Kamenev and Julia S. Meyer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0507695},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

24 pages, 8 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-22T11:20:38.810Z