| 3 | Coulomb blockade |
A paradox of solid state physics is that electrons in conductors are almost exclusively regarded as non-interacting particles, even though they do interact. This comes both from physical reasons and from the human need for convenience. The physical reason is that the interacting electrons form a ground state, and charged elementary excitations above the state – quasielectrons – do not interact provided their energies are sufficiently close to the Fermi surface. This makes a model of non-interacting electrons completely adequate for quasielectrons, at least in the low-energy limit. This allows a scattering approach to quantum transport that assumes the absence of interaction. The convenience model is that the physics ...
No credit card required