Ballistic Electron Quantum Transport in Presence of a Disordered Background

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a many-body environment affects electron transport in a 2D ballistic structure, revealing a new decoherence mechanism that influences interference and localization phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decoherence mechanism caused by environmental many-body effects, modeled within a resonance scattering framework, and highlights the role of doorway resonance spreading width.

Findings

Decoherence and absorption depend on the spreading width of doorway resonances.

Environmental effects can cause apparent particle loss and suppression of weak localization.

Electron transmission involves incoherent sums of damped resonances and re-emitted particles.

Abstract

Effect of a complicated many-body environment is analyzed on the electron random scattering by a 2D mesoscopic open ballistic structure. A new mechanism of decoherence is proposed. The temperature of the environment is supposed to be zero whereas the energy of the incoming particle $E_{in}$ can be close to or somewhat above the Fermi surface in the environment. The single-particle doorway resonance states excited in the structure via external channels are damped not only because of escape through such channels but also due to the ulterior population of the long-lived environmental states. Transmission of an electron with a given incoming $E_{in}$ through the structure turns out to be an incoherent sum of the flow formed by the interfering damped doorway resonances and the retarded flow of the particles re-emitted into the structure by the environment. Though the number of the particles is conserved in each individual event of transmission, there exists a probability that some part of the electron's energy can be absorbed due to environmental many-body effects. In such a case the electron can disappear from the resonance energy interval and elude observation at the fixed transmission energy $E_{in}$ thus resulting in seeming loss of particles, violation of the time reversal symmetry and, as a consequence, suppression of the weak localization. The both decoherence and absorption phenomena are treated within the framework of a unit microscopic model based on the general theory of the resonance scattering. All the effects discussed are controlled by the only parameter: the spreading width of the doorway resonances, that uniquely determines the decoherence rate