1 research outputs found
Ulta-slow relaxation in discontinuous-film based electron glasses
We present field effect measurements on discontinuous 2D thin films which are
composed of a sub monolayer of nano-grains of Au, Ni, Ag or Al. Like other
electron glasses these systems exhibit slow conductance relaxation and memory
effects. However, unlike other systems, the discontinuous films exhibit a
dramatic slowing down of the dynamics below a characteristic temperature .
is typically between 10-50K and is sample dependent. For the
sample exhibits a few other peculiar features such as repeatable conductance
fluctuations in millimeter size samples. We suggest that the enhanced system
sluggishness is related to the current carrying network becoming very dilute in
discontinuous films so that the system contains many parts which are
electrically very weakly connected and the transport is dominated by very few
weak links. This enables studying the glassy properties of the sample as it
transitions from a macroscopic sample to a mesocopic sample, hence, the results
provide new insight on the underlying physics of electron glasses.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure