arXiv subjects

Igor V. Lerner

Publications and source records attributed to Igor V. Lerner.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2005

Low-Temperature Decoherence of Qubit Coupled to Background Charges

We have found an exact expression for the decoherence rate of a Josephson charge qubit coupled to fluctuating background charges. At low temperatures $T$ the decoherence rate $Γ$ is linear in $T$ while at high temperatures it saturates in agreement with a known classical solution which, however, reached at surprisingly high $T$. In contrast to the classical picture, impurity states spread in a wide interval of energies ($\gg T$) may essentially contribute to $Γ$.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2004

Comment on 'Anomalous Conductance Distribution in Q1D Gold Wires: Possible Violation of the One-Parameter Scaling Hypothesis' [PRL 88, 146601 (2002)]

Mohanty and Webb [Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 146601 (2002), cond-mat/0204298] claim that their data on conductance fluctuations in gold wires contradict the one-parameter scaling. We show that flaws in extracting values of the cumulants (irreducible moments) < > of the conductance distribution (for n=3,4) invalidate all the conclusions made there. The actual values of the cumulants determined by us from the published raw data contained in Ref. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 146601 (2002)] are orders of magnitude smaller than those claimed. Moreover, the limited applicability of the ergodicity hypothesis makes the higher order cumulants extracted from magnetofingerprints statistically unreliable. Thus, the data of Ref. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 146601 (2002)] do not warrant any statement on the violation or validity of the one-parameter scaling.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2003

Nonlinear Sigma Model for Normal and Superconducting Systems: A Pedestrian Approach

The nonlinear sigma model (NLSM) epitomises a field-theoretical approach to (interacting) electrons in disordered media. These lectures are aimed at the audience who might have vaguely heard about its existence but know very little of what is that, even less so of why it should be used and next to nothing of how it can be applied. These what, why and mainly how are the subject of the present lectures. In the first part, after a short description of why to be bothered, the NLSM is derived from scratch in a relatively simple (but still rather mathematical) way for non-interacting electrons in the presence of disorder, and some illustration of its perturbative usage is given. In the second part it is generalised, not without some leap of faith, to include the Coulomb repulsion and superconducting pairing.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2003

Functional Integral Bosonization for Impurity in Luttinger Liquid

We use a functional integral formalism developed earlier for the pure Luttinger liquid (LL) to find an exact representation for the electron Green function of the LL in the presence of a single backscattering impurity. This allows us to reproduce results (well known from the bosonization techniques) for the suppression of the electron local density of states (LDoS) at the position of the impurity and for the Friedel oscillations at finite temperature. In addition, we have extracted from the exact representation an analytic dependence of LDoS on the distance from the impurity and shown how it crosses over to that for the pure LL.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2003

On the Applicability of the Ergodicity Hypothesis to Mesoscopic Fluctuations

We evaluate a typical value of higher order cumulants (irreducible moments) of conductance fluctuations that could be extracted from magneto-conductance measurements in a single sample when an external magnetic field is swept over an interval $B_0$. We find that the n-th cumulant has a sample-dependent random part $\pm \gN 2^{n/2}\sqrt{a_{n}B_{c}/B_{0}}$, where $\gN 2$ is the variance of conductance fluctuations, $B_{c}$ is a correlation field, and $a_{n}\sim n!$. This means that an apparent deviation of the conductance distribution from a Gaussian shape, manifested by non-vanishing higher cumulants, can be a spurious result of correlations of conductances at different values of the magnetic field.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2003

Statistical Properties of The First Excited State of an Interacting Many Particle Disordered System

The distribution $P_1$ of the first many-body excitation energy of a weakly and moderately interacting electron gas in a finite conductor (in the diffusive regime) is calculated. As the interaction is increased, $P_1$ crosses over from Wigner-Dyson to Poisson. We characterize this transition through the inverse participation ratio in Hilbert space, and examine its manifestation in a projected 2-dimensional space.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

arXiv2002

Nonlinear Sigma Model for Disordered Media: Replica Trick for Non-Perturbative Results and Interactions

In these lectures, given at the NATO ASI at Windsor (2001), applications of the replicas nonlinear sigma model to disordered systems are reviewed. A particular attention is given to two sets of issues. First, obtaining non-perturbative results in the replica limit is discussed, using as examples (i) an oscillatory behaviour of the two-level correlation function and (ii) long-tail asymptotes of different mesoscopic distributions. Second, a new variant of the sigma model for interacting electrons in disordered normal and superconducting systems is presented, with demonstrating how to reduce it, under certain controlled approximations, to known ``phase-only'' actions, including that of the ``dirty bosons'' model.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

arXiv2001

Nonlinear $σ$ model for disordered superconductors

We suggest a novel nonlinear $σ$-model for the description of disordered superconductors. The main distinction from existing models lies in the fact that the saddle point equation is solved non-perturbatively in the superconducting pairing field. It allows one to use the model both in the vicinity of the metal-superconductor transition and well below its critical temperature with full account for the self-consistency conditions. We show that the model reproduces a set of known results in different limiting cases, and apply it for a self-consistent description of the proximity effect at the superconductor-metal interface.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2001

Anderson Orthogonality Catastrophe in Disordered Systems

We study the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe (AOC) in finite conductors with diffusive disorder. The disorder averaged logarithm of $χ$, the overlap between the ground states before and after adding a static impurity, is found to depend nonmonotonically on the disorder. In two dimensions $<\lnχ^{-1}> \propto \ln^2 N$ in the weak disorder limit, thus showing a stronger dependence on the number of electrons $N$ than in the canonical AOC. A very broad tail of the distribution of $χ$, found numerically, is a signature of the importance of a few-level statistics at the Fermi energy.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2000

Granulated superconductors:from the nonlinear sigma model to the Bose-Hubbard description

We modify a nonlinear sigma model (NLSM) for the description of a granulated disordered system in the presence of both the Coulomb repulsion and the Cooper pairing. We show that under certain controlled approximations this model is reduced to the Bose-Hubbard (or ``dirty-boson'') model with renormalized coupling constants. We obtain a more general effective action (which is still simpler than the full NLSM action) which can be applied in the region of parameters where the reduction to the Bose-Hubbard model is not justified. This action may lead to a different picture of the superconductor-insulator transition in 2D systems.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv1999

Delocalization in an open one-dimensional chain in an imaginary vector potential

We present first results for the transmittance, T, through a 1D disordered system with an imaginary vector potential, ih, which provide a new analytical criterion for a delocalization transition in the model. It turns out that the position of the critical curve on the complex energy plane (i.e. the curve where an exponential decay of is changed by a power-law one) is different from that obtained previously from the complex energy spectra. Corresponding curves for or are also different. This happens because of different scales of the exponential decay of one-particle Green's functions (GF) defining the spectra and many-particle GF governing transport characteristics, and reflects higher-order correlations in localized eigenstates of the non-Hermitian model.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

arXiv1999

Non-perturbative results for level correlations from the replica nonlinear sigma model

We show that for all the three standard symmetry classes (unitary, orthogonal and symplectic), the conventional replica nonlinear sigma model gives the correct non-perturbative result for the two-level correlation functions R_2(ω) of electrons in disordered metals in the limit of large ω. In this limit, non-perturbative oscillatory contributions arise from a degenerate saddle-point manifold within this sigma model which corresponds to the replica-symmetry breaking. Moreover, we demonstrate that in the unitary case the very same results can be extracted from the well known exact integral representation for R_2(ω).

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

arXiv1999

Can the trace formula describe weak localisation?

We attempt to systematically derive perturbative quantum corrections to the Berry diagonal approximation of the two-level correlation function (TLCF) for chaotic systems. To this end, we develop a ``weak diagonal approximation'' based on a recent description of the first weak localisation correction to conductance in terms of the Gutzwiller trace formula. This semiclassical method is tested by using it to derive the weak localisation corrections to the TLCF for a semiclassically disordered system. Unfortunately the method is unable to correctly reproduce the ``Hikami boxes'' (the relatively small regions where classical paths are glued together by quantum processes). This results in the method failing to reproduce the well known weak localisation expansion. It so happens that for the first order correction it merely produces the wrong prefactor. However for the second order correction, it is unable to reproduce certain contributions, and leads to a result which is of a different form to the standard one.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv1998

Spectral statistics in disordered metals: a trajectories approach

We show that the perturbative expansion of the two-level correlation function, $R(ω)$, in disordered conductors can be understood semiclassically in terms of self-intersecting particle trajectories. This requires the extension of the standard diagonal approximation to include pairs of paths which are non-identical but have almost identical action. The number of diagrams thus produced is much smaller than in a standard field-theoretical approach. We show that such a simplification occurs because $R(ω)$ has a natural representation as the second derivative of free energy $F(ω)$. We calculate $R(ω)$ to 3-loop order, and verify a one-parameter scaling hypothesis for it in 2d. We discuss the possibility of applying our ``weak diagonal approximation'' to generic chaotic systems.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv1997

Effect of dephasing on mesoscopic conductance fluctuations in quantum dots with single channel leads

We consider the distribution of conductance fluctuations in disordered quantum dots with single channel leads. Using a perturbative diagrammatic approach, valid for continuous level spectra, we describe dephasing due to processes within the dot by considering two different contributions to the level broadening, thus satisfying particle number conservation. Instead of a completely non-Gaussian distribution, which occurs for zero dephasing, we find for strong dephasing that the distribution is mainly Gaussian with non-universal variance and non-Gaussian tails.

cond-mat↗

arXiv1997

Deviations from the Gaussian distribution of mesoscopic conductance fluctuations

The conductance distribution of metallic mesoscopic systems is considered. The variance of this distribution describes the universal conductance fluctuations, yielding a Gaussian distribution of the conductance. We calculate diagrammatically the third cumulant of this distribution, the leading deviation from the Gaussian. We confirm random matrix theory calculations that the leading contribution in quasi-one dimension vanishes. However, in quasi two dimensions the third cumulant is negative, whereas in three dimensions it is positive.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv1996

Mesoscopic conductance fluctuations in dirty quantum dots with single channel leads

We consider a distribution of conductance fluctuations in quantum dots with single channel leads and continuous level spectra and we demonstrate that it has a distinctly non-Gaussian shape and strong dependence on time-reversal symmetry, in contrast to an almost Gaussian distribution of conductances in a disordered metallic sample connected to a reservoir by broad multi-channel leads. In the absence of time-reversal symmetry, our results obtained within the diagrammatic approach coincide with those derived within non-perturbative techniques. In addition, we show that the distribution has lognormal tails for weak disorder, similar to the case of broad leads, and that it becomes almost lognormal as the amount of disorder is increased towards the Anderson transition.

cond-mat↗

arXiv1996

Random Walks through the Ensemble: Linking Spectral Statistics with Wavefunction Correlations in Disordered Metals

We use a random walk in the ensemble of impurity configurations to generate a Brownian motion model for energy levels in disordered conductors. Treating arc-length along the random walk as fictitous time, the resulting Langevin equation relates spectral statistics to eigenfunction correlations. Solving this equation at energy scales large compared with the mean level spacing, we obtain the spectral form factor, and its parametric dependence.

cond-mat↗