Biomedical subjects

B L Altshuler

Publications and source records attributed to B L Altshuler.

12 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Weak-localization magnetoresistance and valley symmetry in graphene.

Because of the chiral nature of electrons in a monolayer of graphite (graphene) one can expect weak antilocalization and a positive weak-field magnetoresistance in it. However, trigonal warping (which breaks p-->-p symmetry of the Fermi line in each valley) suppresses antilocalization, while intervalley scattering due to atomically sharp scatterers in a realistic graphene sheet or by edges in a narrow wire tends to restore conventional negative magnetoresistance. We show this by evaluating the dependence of the magnetoresistance of graphene on relaxation rates associated with various possible ways of breaking a "hidden" valley symmetry of the system.

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PubMed2006

Non-Gaussian low-frequency noise as a source of qubit decoherence.

We study decoherence in a qubit with the distance between the two levels affected by random flips of bistable fluctuators. For the case of a single fluctuator we evaluate explicitly an exact expression for the phase-memory decay in the echo experiment with a resonant ac excitation. The echo signal as a function of time shows a sequence of plateaus. The position and the height of the plateaus can be used to extract the fluctuator switching rate gamma and its coupling strength v. At small times the logarithm of the echo signal is proportional to t3. The plateaus disappear when the decoherence is induced by many fluctuators. In this case the echo signal depends on the distribution of the fluctuators parameters. According to our analysis, the results significantly deviate from those obtained in the Gaussian model as soon as v greater than or approximately equal gamma.

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PubMed2005

Anisotropy of spin splitting and spin relaxation in lateral quantum dots.

Inelastic spin relaxation and spin splitting epsilon(s) in lateral quantum dots are studied in the regime of strong in-plane magnetic field. Because of both the g-factor energy dependence and spin-orbit coupling, epsilon(s) demonstrates a substantial nonlinear magnetic field dependence similar to that observed by Hanson et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 196802 (2003)]. It also varies with the in-plane orientation of the magnetic field due to crystalline anisotropy of the spin-orbit coupling. The spin relaxation rate is also anisotropic, the anisotropy increasing with the field. When the magnetic length is less than the "thickness" of the GaAs dot, the relaxation can be an order of magnitude faster for B ||[100] than for B || [110].

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PubMed2005

Spin-orbit coupling and anisotropy of spin splitting in quantum dots.

In lateral quantum dots, the combined effect of both Dresselhaus and Bychkov-Rashba spin-orbit coupling is equivalent to an effective magnetic field +/- B(SO) which has the opposite sign for s(z)= +/- 1/2 spin electrons. When the external magnetic field is perpendicular to the planar structure, the field B(SO) generates an additional splitting for electron states as compared to the spin splitting in the in-plane field orientation. The anisotropy of spin splitting has been measured and then analyzed in terms of spin-orbit coupling in several AlGaAs/GaAs quantum dots by means of resonant tunneling spectroscopy. From the measured values and sign of the anisotropy we are able to determine the dominating spin-orbit coupling mechanism.

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PubMed2004

Coulomb scattering in a 2D interacting electron gas and production of EPR pairs.

We propose a setup to generate nonlocal spin Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pairs via pair collisions in a 2D interacting electron gas, based on constructive two-particle interference in the spin-singlet channel at the pi/2 scattering angle. We calculate the scattering amplitude via the Bethe-Salpeter equation in the ladder approximation and small r(s) limit and find that the Fermi sea leads to a substantial renormalization of the bare scattering process. From the scattering length, we estimate the current of spin-entangled electrons and show that it is within experimental reach.

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PubMed2003

Scaling and the center-of-band anomaly in a one-dimensional Anderson model with diagonal disorder.

We resolve the problem of the violation of single parameter scaling at the zero energy of the Anderson tight-binding model with diagonal disorder. It follows from the symmetry properties of the tight-binding Hamiltonian that this spectral point is, in fact, a boundary between two adjacent bands. The states in the vicinity of this energy behave similarly to states at other band boundaries, which are known to violate single parameter scaling.

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PubMed2003

Random matrix theory for closed quantum dots with weak spin-orbit coupling.

To lowest order in the coupling strength, the spin-orbit coupling in quantum dots results in a spin-dependent Aharonov-Bohm flux. This flux decouples the spin-up and spin-down random matrix theory ensembles of the quantum dot. We employ this ensemble and find significant changes in the distribution of the Coulomb blockade peak height, in particular, a decrease of the width of the distribution. The puzzling disagreement between standard random matrix theory and the experimental distributions by Patel et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 5900 (1998)]] might possibly be attributed to these spin-orbit effects.

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PubMed2002

Quantum transport in parallel magnetic fields: a realization of the Berry-Robnik symmetry phenomenon.

We analyze the magnetoconductance of two-dimensional electron and hole gases subject to a parallel magnetic field. It is shown that, for confining potential wells which are symmetric with respect to spatial inversion, a temperature-dependent weak localization signal exists even in the presence of a magnetic field. Deviations from this symmetry lead to magnetoconductance profiles that contain information on both the geometry of the confining potential and characteristics of the disorder.

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PubMed2002

Coulomb "Blockade" of nuclear spin relaxation in quantum dots.

We study the mechanism of nuclear spin relaxation in quantum dots due to the electron exchange with the 2D gas. We show that the nuclear spin relaxation rate 1/T(1) is dramatically affected by the Coulomb blockade (CB) and can be controlled by gate voltage. In the case of strong spin-orbit (SO) coupling the relaxation rate is maximal in the CB valleys, whereas for the weak SO coupling the maximum of 1/T(1) is near the CB peaks.

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PubMed2002

Coherent electron transport in a Si quantum dot dimer.

We show that the coherence of charge transfer through a weakly coupled double-dot dimer can be determined by analyzing the statistics of the conductance pattern, and does not require a large phase coherence length in the host material. We present an experimental study of the charge transport through a small Si nanostructure, which contains two quantum dots. The transport through the dimer is shown to be coherent. At the same time, one of the dots is strongly coupled to the leads, and the overall transport is dominated by inelastic cotunneling processes.

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PubMed2001

Conductance peak motion due to a magnetic field in weakly coupled chaotic quantum dots.

We study the influence of moderate exchange interactions on the behavior of the peaks in the conductance of single electron transistors. We numerically reproduce recently observed features of the magnetic field dependence of both the peak positions and heights. These features unambiguously identify the total spin S of each ground state. We evaluate the probability of each S as a function of the exchange strength J, and external magnetic field B. The expressions involve only J and the g factor as adjustable parameters. For a broad parameter range these probabilities are determined by a linear combination of J and gB.

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PubMed2001

Kondo temperature for the two-channel Kondo models of tunneling centers.

A two-channel Kondo (2CK) non-Fermi liquid state in a metal resulting from the interaction between electrons and structural defects modeled by double-well potentials (DWP) is revisited. Account only of the two lowest states in DWP is known to lead to rather low Kondo temperature, T(K). We prove that the contribution of higher excited states reduces T(K), if all of the intermediate states are taken into account. Prefactor in T(K) is shown to be determined by the spacing between the second and the third levels epsilon(3) in DWP rather than by the electron Fermi energy epsilon(F). Since epsilon(3)<<epsilon(F) there is no microscopic model of movable defects which may justify 2CK phenomenology.

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