| Issue |
EPL
Volume 98, Number 6, June 2012
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 67006 | |
| Number of page(s) | 5 | |
| Section | Condensed Matter: Electronic Structure, Electrical, Magnetic and Optical Properties | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/98/67006 | |
| Published online | 10 July 2012 | |
Ultra-slow relaxation in discontinuous-film–based electron glasses
Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University - Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel
Received: 6 April 2012
Accepted: 28 May 2012
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 upon lowering the temperature below a characteristic, sample-dependent temperature, T*. For T < T* the sample exhibits a few 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. The results provide new insight into the underlying physics of electron glasses.
PACS: 72.80.Ng – Disordered solids / 73.40.Rw – Metal-insulator-metal structures / 72.20.Ee – Mobility edges; hopping transport
© EPLA, 2012
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.