Abstract
Many phenomena of electrical conduction in small mesoscopic conductors have been successfully explained within the framework of the scattering approach [1]. The main emphasis of this work is an extension of this approach to time-dependent phenomena. Of particular interest are the basic requirements which a dynamic conductance of a mesoscopic conductor has to satisfy. There is a gap in the way dynamic conduction is treated in a large body of the physics literature and in more applied discussions based on simple circuit theory. For an electric network we know that its time-dependent behavior is crucially determined by its capacitive and inductive elements. In contrast to this, time-dependent phenomena are often treated by a response theory of non-interacting carriers. Unfortunately, this approach to ac-conductance which has been employed by some of the leading condensed matter physicists [2] is prevalent. We emphasize that in order to obtain a reasonable answer it is not sufficient to consider non-interacting electrons, a Fermi liquid or even a Luttinger liquid with short range interactions. An analysis based on an electric circuit model gives an answer which conserves the total charge and which has the property that all frequency dependent currents at the input and output nodes of such a circuit add up to zero. To obtain results which are charge and current conserving, it is necessary to consider the implication of the long range Coulomb interaction.
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Büttiker, M., Christen, T. (1996). Basic Elements of Electrical Conduction. In: Kramer, B. (eds) Quantum Transport in Semiconductor Submicron Structures. NATO ASI Series, vol 326. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1760-6_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1760-6_13
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