High-field measurements of electron decoherence time in metallic nanowires: switching off magnetic impurity spins.
We report low-temperature measurements of electron decoherence time in a series of pure gold wires, 18 nm thick and 30 nm wide. At fields up to 15 T, large enough to polarize any concentration of magnetic impurity spins, conductance fluctuation measurements show almost no temperature dependence of the decoherence time below 300 mK, both in the correlation field for interference and the root-mean-square value of the fluctuations. Combined with previous low-field weak localization measurements on samples from similar material, our experiment suggests that the ubiquitous saturation of decoherence time in these samples is not due to any mechanism based on magnetic impurity spins.
Mohanty
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Department of Physics, Boston University, 590 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA.
Webb
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