Inelastic cotunneling through a long diffusive wire

Abstract

We show that electron transport through a long multichannel wire, connected to leads by tunnel junctions, at low temperatures and voltages is dominated by inelastic cotunnelling. This mechanism results in experimentally observed power-law dependence of conductance on temperature and voltage, in the diffusive regime where usual Coulomb anomaly theory leads to exponentially low conductance. The power-law exponent is proportional to the distance between contacts.