Spectroscopy of discrete energy levels in ultrasmall metallic grains

By J. Delft, Daniel C. Ralph. 2001

311 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We review recent experimental and theoretical work on ultrasmall metallic grains, i.e. grains sufficiently small that the conduction electron energy spectrum becomes discrete. The discrete excitation spectrum of an individual grain can be measured by the technique of single-electron tunneling spectroscopy: the spectrum is extracted from the current–voltage characteristics of a single-electron transistor containing the grain as central island. We review experiments studying the influence on the discrete spectrum of superconductivity, nonequilibrium excitations, spin–orbit scattering and ferromagnetism. We also review the theoretical descriptions of these phenomena in ultrasmall grains, which require modifications or extensions of the standard bulk theories to include the effects of level discreteness.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/52e86d79eb992f857c441b456ba13b3c2e2dbf28

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Spins in few-electron quantum dots (2006, background): “…materials: for instance single molecules trapped between electrodes (Park et al., 2002), normal metal(Petta and Ralph, 2001), superconducting (von Delft and Ralph, 2001; Ralph et al., 1995) or ferromagnetic nanoparticles (Guéron et al., 1999), selfassembled quantum dots (Klein et al., 1996),…”
Pairing in Nuclear Systems: From Neutron Stars to Finite Nuclei (2002, background): “This agrees also with e.g., the results for ultrasmall metallic grains (von Delft and Ralph, 2001).”
Fermi gases in one dimension: From Bethe ansatz to experiments (2013, methodology): “The traditional s-wave BCS pairing models have various applications to problems in condensed matter physics (Dukelsky et al., 2004; Links et al., 2003; Ying et al., 2008a,b), nuclear physics (Pan and Draayer, 2002) and ultrasmall metallic grains (von Delft and Ralph, 2001) etc.”
Colloquium: Exactly solvable Richardson-Gaudin models for many-body quantum systems (2004, methodology): “[For a review, see von Delft and Ralph (2001).]”