Electron transport in two-dimensional arrays

Abstract

We study charge transport in a granular array with high inter-grain conductances. We show that the system exhibits a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless crossover from the high-temperature conducting state into a low-temperature insulating state. The crossover takes place at a critical temperature T_{BKT} \propto E_c exp{-g}, where E_c is the charging energy of a grain and g >> 1 is the dimensionless inter-grain conductance. A uniformly applied gate voltage drives the insulator into a conducting charge liquid state followed by an insulating lattice-pinned Wigner crystal state at larger values of the gate voltage. Technically, we establish correspondence between the charge and phase representations, employing the instanton gas summation in the framework of the phase model.

12 pages, 4 figures