We develop a theory of a variable range hopping transport in granular conductors based on the sequential electron tunnelling through many grains in the presence of the strong Coulomb interaction. The processes of quantum tunnelling of real electrons are represented as trajectories (world lines) of charged classical particles in d+1 dimensions. We apply the developed technique to investigate the hopping conductivity of granular systems in the regime of small tunneling conductances between the grains g << 1.
We study the electron thermal transport in granular metals at large tunnel conductance between the grains, $g_T gg 1$ and not too low a temperature $T > g_Tdelta$, where $delta$ is the mean energy level spacing for a single grain. Taking into account the electron-electron interaction effects we calculate the thermal conductivity and show that the Wiedemann-Franz law is violated for granular metals. We find that interaction effects suppress the thermal conductivity less than the electrical conductivity.
We report an universal behaviour of hopping transport in strongly interacting mesoscopic two-dimensional electron systems (2DES). In a certain window of background disorder, the resistivity at low perpendicular magnetic fields follows the expected relation $rho(B_perp) = rho_{rm{B}}exp(alpha B_perp^2)$. The prefactor $rho_{rm{B}}$ decreases exponentially with increasing electron density but saturates to a finite value at higher densities. Strikingly, this value is found to be universal when expressed in terms of absolute resistance and and shows quantisation at $R_{rm{B}}approx h/e^2$ and $R_{rm{B}}approx 1/2$ $ h/e^2$. We suggest a strongly correlated electronic phase as a possible explanation.
We review recent advances in the field of full counting statistics (FCS) of charge transfer through impurities imbedded into strongly correlated one-dimensional metallic systems, modelled by Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids (TLLs). We concentrate on the exact analytic solutions for the cumulant generating function (CGF), which became available recently and apply these methods in order to obtain the FCS of a non-trivial contact between two crossed TLL.
For hopping transport in disordered materials, the mobility of charge carriers is strongly dependent on temperature and the electric field. Our numerical study shows that both the energy distribution and the mobility of charge carriers in systems with a Gaussian density of states, such as organic disordered semiconductors, can be described by a single parameter - effective temperature, dependent on the magnitude of the electric field. Furthermore, this effective temperature does not depend on the concentration of charge carriers, while the mobility does depend on the charge carrier concentration. The concept of the effective temperature is shown to be valid for systems with and without space-energy correlations in the distribution of localized states.
It is shown that for the hopping regime, the thermopowers in both finite two-terminal and three-terminal systems are governed by the edges of the samples. This is due to the fact that the energy transfer between a transport electron and a conducting terminal is determined by the site most strongly coupled to that terminal. One-dimensional systems with both nearest-neighbor and variable-range transport as well as certain types of two-dimensional systems, are considered. For a given sample, the changes in the thermopowers due to modifying the bulk are quite limited, compared with those of the conductance. When the small thermopower changes exist, their average over a large ensemble of mesoscopic samples will vanish. We also obtain the distribution of the thermopower in such an ensemble and show that its width approaches a finite limit with increasing sample length. This contrasts with the distribution of conductances in such systems, whose width vanishes in the long sample limit. Finally, we find that the thermal conductances in the three-terminal case have a boundary-dominated contribution, due to non-percolating conduction paths. This contribution can become dominant when the usual conductance is small enough. All our theoretical statements are backed by numerical computations.