Abstract
At the heart of the phenomenon of electrical conductance is Ohm’s law
empirically found by Georg Simon Ohm1 and published in Refs. [1,2] dating back to the years 1826 and 1827. It states that the application of a voltage U to a conductor gives rise to a current I proportional to U or, equivalently, if a current is driven through a conductor, a voltage will build up proportional to the current (see Fig. 1.1). The proportionality constant is called electrical resistance R, its inverse G = R -1 is called electrical conductance. Over the last 175 years tremendous insight has been gained into the microscopic mechanisms leading to the appearance of a resistance in conducting materials.
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References
Georg Simon Ohm, * 16 March 1789, Erlangen, Germany, †6 July 1854, Munich, Germany.
Edwin Herbert Hall, * 7 November 1855, Gorham (Maine), USA, †20 November 1938, Cambridge (Massachusetts), USA.
Sir Joseph John Thomson, * 18 December 1856, Cheetham Hill (Manchester), England, †30 August 1940, Cambridge, England; Nobel prize in physics 1906.
Paul Drude, * 12 July 1863, Braunschweig, Germany, †5 July 1906, Berlin, Germany.
Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, * 18 July 1853, Arnheim, Netherlands, †4 February 1928, Haarlem, Netherlands; Nobel prize in physics 1902 (with P. Zeeman).
Arnold Sommerfeld, * 5 December 1868, Königsberg, Prussia, †26 April 1951, Munich, Germany.
Felix Bloch, * 23 October 1905, Zurich, Switzerland, †10 September 1983, Zurich, Switzerland, Nobel prize in physics 1952 (with E.M. Purcell).
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Ihn, T. (2004). Electrical conductance: Historical account from Ohm to the semiclassical Drude-Boltzmann theory. In: Electronic Quantum Transport in Mesoscopic Semiconductor Structures. Springer Tracts in Modern Physics, vol 192. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-21828-9_1
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