Universal conductance fluctuations in indium tin oxide nanowires

Abstract

Magnetic field dependent universal conductance fluctuations (UCF's) are observed in weakly disordered indium tin oxide nanowires from 0.26 K up to $\sim 25$ K. The fluctuation magnitudes increase with decreasing temperature, reaching a fraction of $e^2/h$ at $T\lesssim 1$ K. The shape of the UCF patterns is found to be very sensitive to thermal cycling of the sample to room temperatures, which induces irreversible impurity reconfigurations. On the other hand, the UCF magnitudes are insensitive to thermal cycling. Our measured temperature dependence of the root-mean-square UCF magnitudes are compared with the existing theory [C. W. J. Beenakker and H. van Houten, Phys. Rev. B \textbf{37}, 6544 (1988)]. A notable discrepancy is found, which seems to imply that the experimental UCF's are not cut off by the thermal diffusion length $L_T$, as would be expected by the theoretical prediction when $L_T<L_{\phi }$, where $L_{\phi }$ is the electron dephasing length. The approximate electron dephasing length is inferred from the UCF magnitudes and compared with that extracted from the weak-localization magnetoresistance studies. A reasonable semiquantitative agreement is observed.

11 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Bulk Band Gap and Surface State Conduction Observed in Voltage-Tuned Crystals of the Topological Insulator Bi${}_2$Se${}_3$
• Dephasing in (Ga,Mn)As nanowires and rings
• Sample-specific and Ensemble-averaged Magnetoconductance of Individual Single-Wall Carbon Nanotubes
• Long electron dephasing length and disorder-induced spin-orbit coupling in indium tin oxide nanowires

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Two-dimensional universal conductance fluctuations and the electron-phonon interaction of topological surface states in Bi2Te2Se nanoribbons