Inelastic electron transport in granular arrays

Abstract

Transport properties of granular systems are governed by Coulomb blockade effects caused by the discreteness of the electron charge. We show that, in the limit of vanishing mean level spacing on the grains, the low-temperature behavior of 1d and 2d arrays is insulating at any inter-grain coupling (characterized by a dimensionless conductance g.) In 2d and g>>1, there is a sharp Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless crossover to the conducting phase at a certain temperature, T_{BKT}. These results are obtained by applying an instanton analysis to map the conventional `phase' description of granular arrays onto the dual `charge' representation.