Temperature induced phase averaging in one-dimensional mesoscopic systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how finite temperature causes phase averaging in one-dimensional mesoscopic systems with multiple barriers, leading to distinctive conductance behaviors and power-law dependencies that can differentiate from dephasing effects.

Contribution

It introduces a model showing temperature-induced phase averaging in 1D systems with multiple barriers and predicts unique conductance power laws as experimental signatures.

Findings

Total conductance scales as the geometric mean of individual barrier conductances.

Power-law behavior in conductance with temperature reveals phase averaging effects.

Distinct exponents can differentiate phase averaging from dephasing in experiments.

Abstract

We analyse phase averaging in one-dimensional interacting mesoscopic systems with several barriers and show that for incommensurate positions an independent average over several phases can be induced by finite temperature. For three strong barriers with conductances G_i and mutual distances larger than the thermal length, we obtain G ~ sqrt{G_1 G_2 G_3} for the total conductance G. For an interacting wire, this implies power laws in G(T) with novel exponents, which we propose as an experimental fingerprint to distinguish temperature induced phase averaging from dephasing.