No Arabic abstract
Graphene provides a fascinating testbed for new physics and exciting opportunities for future applications based on quantum phenomena. To understand the coherent flow of electrons through a graphene device, we employ a nanoscale probe that can access the relevant length scales - the tip of a liquid-He-cooled scanning probe microscope (SPM) capacitively couples to the graphene device below, creating a movable scatterer for electron waves. At sufficiently low temperatures and small size scales, the diffusive transport of electrons through graphene becomes coherent, leading to universal conductance fluctuations (UCF). By scanning the tip over a device, we map these conductance fluctuations textit{vs.} scatterer position. We find that the conductance is highly sensitive to the tip position, producing $delta G sim e^2/h$ fluctuations when the tip is displaced by a distance comparable to half the Fermi wavelength. These measurements are in good agreement with detailed quantum simulations of the imaging experiment, and demonstrate the value of a cooled SPM for probing coherent transport in graphene.
Mesoscopic transport measurements reveal a large effective phase coherence length in epitaxial GaMnAs ferromagnets, contrary to usual 3d-metal ferromagnets. Universal conductance fluctuations of single nanowires are compared for epilayers with a tailored anisotropy. At large magnetic fields, quantum interferences are due to structural disorder only, and an unusual behavior related to hole-induced ferromagnetism is evidenced, for both quantum interferences and decoherence. At small fields, phase coherence is shown to persist down to zero field, even in presence of magnons, and an additional spin disorder contribution to quantum interferences is observed under domain walls nucleation.
We report on van der Waals epitaxial growth, materials characterization and magnetotransport experiments in crystalline nanosheets of Bismuth Telluro-Sulfide (BTS). Highly layered, good-quality crystalline nanosheets of BTS are obtained on SiO$_2$ and muscovite mica. Weak-antilocalization (WAL), electron-electron interaction-driven insulating ground state and universal conductance fluctuations are observed in magnetotransport experiments on BTS devices. Temperature, thickness and magnetic field dependence of the transport data indicate the presence of two-dimensional surface states along with bulk conduction, in agreement with theoretical models. An extended-WAL model is proposed and utilized in conjunction with a two-channel conduction model to analyze the data, revealing a surface component and evidence of multiple conducting channels. A facile growth method and detailed magnetotransport results indicating BTS as an alternative topological insulator material system are presented.
A key feature of topological insulators (TI) is symplectic symmetry of the Hamiltonian which changes to unitary when time reversal symmetry is lifted and the topological phase transition occurs. However, such a crossover has never been explicitly observed, by directly probing the symmetry class of the Hamiltonian. In this report, we have probed the symmetry class of topological insulators by measuring the mesoscopic conductance fluctuations in the TI Bi$_{1.6}$Sb$_{0:4}$Te$_2$Se, which shows an exact factor of two reduction on application of a magnetic field due to crossover from symplectic to unitary symmetry classes. The reduction provides an unambiguous proof that the fluctuations arise from the universal conductance fluctuations (UCF), due to quantum interference and persists from T = 22 mK to 4.2 K. We have also compared the phase breaking length (l$_phi$) extracted from both magneto-conductivity and UCF which agree well within a factor of two in the entire temperature and gate voltage range. Our experiment confirms UCF as the major source of fluctuations in mesoscopic disordered topological insulators, and the intrinsic preservation of time reversal symmetry in these systems.
We present data of transport measurements through a metallic nanobridge exhibiting diffusive electron transport. A logarithmic temperature dependence and a zero-bias anomaly in the differential conductance are observed, independent of magnetic field. The data can be described by a single scaling law. The theory of electron-electron interaction in disordered systems, adapted to the case of finite-size systems in non-equilibrium, yields quantitative agreement with experiment. Measurements of universal conductance functuations support the assumptions of the theory about the electronic phase coherence.
We study fluctuations of the conductance of micron-sized graphene devices as a function of the Fermi energy and magnetic field. The fluctuations are studied in combination with analysis of weak localization which is determined by the same scattering mechanisms. It is shown that the variance of conductance fluctuations depends not only on inelastic scattering that controls dephasing but also on elastic scattering. In particular, contrary to its effect on weak localization, strong intervalley scattering suppresses conductance fluctuations in graphene. The correlation energy, however, is independent of the details of elastic scattering and can be used to determine the electron temperature of graphene structures.