Temperature and ac Effects on Charge Transport in Metallic Arrays of Dots

TL;DR

This study uses numerical simulations to explore how finite temperature, dc pulses, and ac drives influence charge transport in metallic dot arrays, revealing threshold behaviors and scaling laws consistent with experiments.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the effects of ac and dc drives on charge conduction thresholds and dynamics in metallic arrays, supported by numerical results.

Findings

Finite temperature reduces conduction threshold linearly.

Current-voltage curves exhibit quadratic scaling independent of temperature.

Ac drive decreases conduction threshold with increasing amplitude and frequency.

Abstract

We investigate the effects of finite temperature, dc pulse, and ac drives on the charge transport in metallic arrays using numerical simulations. For finite temperatures there is a finite conduction threshold which decreases linearly with temperature. Additionally we find a quadratic scaling of the current-voltage curves which is independent of temperature for finite thresholds. These results are in excellent agreement with recent experiments on 2D metallic dot arrays. We have also investigated the effects of an ac drive as well as a suddenly applied dc drive. With an ac drive the conduction threshold decreases for fixed frequency and increasing amplitude and saturates for fixed amplitude and increasing frequency. For sudden applied dc drives below threshold we observe a long time power law conduction decay.