Quantum to Classical Transition of the Charge Relaxation Resistance of a Mesoscopic Capacitor

TL;DR

This paper investigates how dephasing affects the charge relaxation resistance of a mesoscopic capacitor, revealing that partial dephasing does not produce a simple inverse relation with transmission, unlike full inelastic scattering.

Contribution

It demonstrates that single-edge state dephasing alone does not generate interface resistance and clarifies conditions under which the two-terminal resistance behavior emerges.

Findings

Dephasing of a single edge state does not produce interface resistance.

Incoherent limit results in resistance as sum of interface and Landauer resistances.

Large number of dephasing channels recovers the inverse transmission relation.

Abstract

We present an analysis of the effect of dephasing on the single channel charge relaxation resistance of a mesoscopic capacitor in the linear low frequency regime. The capacitor consists of a cavity which is via a quantum point contact connected to an electron reservoir and Coulomb coupled to a gate. The capacitor is in a perpendicular high magnetic field such that only one (spin polarized) edge state is (partially) transmitted through the contact. In the coherent limit the charge relaxation resistance for a single channel contact is independent of the transmission probability of the contact and given by half a resistance quantum. The loss of coherence in the conductor is modeled by attaching to it a fictitious probe, which draws no net current. In the incoherent limit one could expect a charge relaxation resistance that is inversely proportional to the transmission probability of the quantum point contact. However, such a two terminal result requires that scattering is between two electron reservoirs which provide full inelastic relaxation. We find that dephasing of a single edge state in the cavity is not sufficient to generate an interface resistance. As a consequence the charge relaxation resistance is given by the sum of one constant interface resistance and the (original) Landauer resistance. The same result is obtained in the high temperature regime due to energy averaging over many occupied states in the cavity. Only for a large number of open dephasing channels, describing spatially homogenous dephasing in the cavity, do we recover the two terminal resistance, which is inversely proportional to the transmission probability of the QPC. We compare different dephasing models and discuss the relation of our results to a recent experiment.