Artificial Atoms and Molecules: On Many Body Effects and Coherence in Semiconductor Quantum Dots.

摘要

The continuing miniaturization of solid state devices has raised the question how small transistors can be made without changing their properties. People interested in making increasingly more powerful computers will try to avoid these new properties, because things work fine as they are. Judging from the fact that the increasing performance of computers makes it worthwhile to buy a new computer every four years, they are quite successful at it. Other people prefer to ask how one can make devices that have fundamentally new properties, and where these come from. The new properties that we are particularly interested in are those that arise from quantum mechanics or the quantization of charge in units of e. Mesoscopic physics is a subsection of solid state physics and studies systems with sizes in between the microscopic and the macroscopic, where these effects play an important role. It is a mature field and many material systems and geometries have been studied. Examples include thin films, quantum point contacts, small superconducting devices and many others.