No Arabic abstract
Typical experimental measurement is set up as a study of the systems response to a stationary external excitation. This approach considers any random fluctuation of the signal as spurious contribution which is to be eliminated via time-averaging or, equivalently, bandwidth reduction. Beyond that lies a conceptually different paradigm -- the measurement of the systems spontaneous fluctuations. The goal of this overview article is to demonstrate how current noise measurements bring insight into hidden features of electronic transport in various mesoscopic conductors, ranging from 2D topological insulators to individual carbon nanotubes.
Electronegativity is shown to control charge transfer, energy level alignments, and electron currents in single molecule tunnel junctions, all of which are governed by correlations contained within the density matrix. This is demonstrated by the fact that currents calculated from the one-electron reduced density matrix to second order in electron correlation are identical to the currents obtained from the Greens function corrected to second order in electron self-energy.
In LaAlO3/SrTiO3 heterostructures, a commonly observed but poorly understood phenomenon is that of electron trapping in back-gating experiments. In this work, by combining magnetotransport measurements and self-consistent Schroedinger-Poisson calculations, we obtain an empirical relation between the amount of trapped electrons and the gate voltage. We find that the trapped electrons follow an exponentially decaying spatial distribution away from the interface. However, contrary to earlier observations, we find that the Fermi level remains well within the quantum well. The enhanced trapping of electrons induced by the gate voltage can therefore not be explained by a thermal escape mechanism. Further gate sweeping experiments strengthen our conclusion that the thermal escape mechanism is not valid. We propose a new mechanism which involves the electromigration and clustering of oxygen vacancies in SrTiO3. Our work indicates that electron trapping is a universal phenomenon in SrTiO3-based two-dimensional electron systems.
The changes of the spin depolarization length in zinc-blende semiconductors when an external component of correlated noise is added to a static driving electric field are analyzed for different values of field strength, noise amplitude and correlation time. Electron dynamics is simulated by a Monte Carlo procedure which keeps into account all the possible scattering phenomena of the hot electrons in the medium and includes the evolution of spin polarization. Spin depolarization is studied by examinating the decay of the initial spin polarization of the conduction electrons through the Dyakonov-Perel process, the only relevant relaxation mechanism in III-V crystals. Our results show that, for electric field amplitude lower than the Gunn field, the dephasing length shortens with the increasing of the noise intensity. Moreover, a nonmonotonic behavior of spin depolarization length with the noise correlation time is found, characterized by a maximum variation for values of noise correlation time comparable with the dephasing time. Instead, in high field conditions, we find that, critically depending on the noise correlation time, external fluctuations can positively affect the relaxation length. The influence of the inclusion of the electron-electron scattering mechanism is also shown and discussed.
Since its inception in 2001, the science and technology of epitaxial graphene on hexagonal silicon carbide has matured into a major international effort and is poised to become the first carbon electronics platform. A historical perspective is presented and the unique electronic properties of single and multilayered epitaxial graphenes on electronics grade silicon carbide are reviewed. Early results on transport and the field effect in Si-face grown graphene monolayers provided proof-of-principle demonstrations. Besides monolayer epitaxial graphene, attention is given to C-face grown multilayer graphene, which consists of electronically decoupled graphene sheets. Production, structure, and electronic structure are reviewed. The electronic properties, interrogated using a wide variety of surface, electrical and optical probes, are discussed. An overview is given of recent developments of several device prototypes including resistance standards based on epitaxial graphene quantum Hall devices and new ultrahigh frequency analog epitaxial graphene amplifiers.
Consider two Fermi gases with the same {it average} currents: a transport gas, as in solid-state experiments where the chemical potentials of terminal 1 is $mu+eV$ and of terminal 2 and 3 is $mu$, and a beam, i.e., electrons entering only from terminal 1 having energies between $mu$ and $mu+eV$. By expressing the current noise as a sum over single-particle transitions we show that the temporal current fluctuations are very different: The beam is noisier due to allowed single-particle transitions into empty states below $mu$. Surprisingly, the correlations between terminals 2 and 3 are the same.