Continuing miniaturization of electronic devices, together with the quickly growing number of nanotechnological applications, demands a profound understanding of the underlying physics. Most of the fundamental problems of modern condensed matter physics involve various aspects of quantum transport and fluctuation phenomena at the nanoscale. In nanostructures, electrons are usually confined to a limited volume and interact with each other and lattice ions, simultaneously suffering multiple scattering events on impurities, barriers, surface imperfections, and other defects. Electron interaction with other degrees of freedom generally yields two major consequences, quantum dissipation and quantum decoherence. In other words, electrons can lose their energy and ability for quantum interference even at very low temperatures. These two different, but related, processes are at the heart of all quantum phenomena discussed in this book.
This book presents copious details to facilitate the understanding of the basic physics behind a result and the learning to technically reproduce the result without delving into extra literature. The book subtly balances the description of theoretical methods and techniques and the display of the rich landscape of the physical phenomena that can be accessed by these methods. It is useful for a broad readership ranging from master's and PhD students to postdocs and senior researchers.
About the Author: Andrei D. Zaikin is a principal investigator at the Institute of Nanotechnology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, and at I. E. Tamm Theory Department, P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute (LPI), Moscow, Russia. He is also a research professor at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) in 1979 and obtained his PhD in theoretical physics from LPI in 1983. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1995-1996. Professor Zaikin is a world-renowned expert in the theory of superconductivity, quantum nanotransport, quantum dissipation, and quantum decoherence.
Dmitry S. Golubev is a senior research scientist at the Department of Applied Physics, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland. He obtained his PhD in 1995 from MIPT and since then he has been working in the field of condensed matter theory. He has been associated with LPI; Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden; and KIT for extended periods. Dr. Golubev is an expert in the theory of charge and heat transport in various types of nanostructures, including superconducting and normal nanowires, metallic conductors in the Coulomb blockade regime, Josephson junctions, bolometers, and single-electron counting devices.
