Four-terminal resistance of a ballistic quantum wire

R. de Picciotto (), H. L. Stormer, L. N. Pfeiffer, K. W. Baldwin and K. W. West
Additional contact information
R. de Picciotto: Bell-Labs, Lucent Technologies
H. L. Stormer: Bell-Labs, Lucent Technologies
L. N. Pfeiffer: Bell-Labs, Lucent Technologies
K. W. Baldwin: Bell-Labs, Lucent Technologies
K. W. West: Bell-Labs, Lucent Technologies

Nature, 2001, vol. 411, issue 6833, 51-54

Abstract: Abstract The electrical resistance of a conductor is intimately related to the relaxation of the momentum of charge carriers. In a simple model, the accelerating force exerted on electrons by an applied electric field is balanced by a frictional force arising from their frequent collisions with obstacles such as impurities, grain boundaries or other deviations from a perfect crystalline order1. Thus, in the absence of any scattering, the electrical resistance should vanish altogether. Here, we observe such vanishing four-terminal resistance in a single-mode ballistic quantum wire. This result contrasts the value of the standard two-probe resistance measurements of h/2e2≈ 13 kΩ. The measurements are conducted in the highly controlled geometry afforded by epitaxial growth onto the cleaved edge of a high-quality GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructure. Two weakly invasive voltage probes are attached to the central section of a ballistic quantum wire to measure the inherent resistance of this clean one-dimensional conductor.

Date: 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35075009 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:411:y:2001:i:6833:d:10.1038_35075009

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/35075009

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().