Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 166803 (2011) [4 pages]

Rings and Boxes in Dissipative Environments

Yoav Etzioni1, Baruch Horovitz1, and Pierre Le Doussal2
1Department of Physics, Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva 84105 Israel
2CNRS-Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, 24 rue Lhomond,75231 Cedex 05, Paris France

Received 21 January 2011; published 19 April 2011

We study a particle on a ring in presence of a dissipative Caldeira-Leggett environment and derive its response to a dc field. We find, through a 2-loop renormalization group analysis, that a large dissipation parameter η flows to a fixed point ηR=ηc=/2π. We also reexamine the mapping of this problem to that of the Coulomb box and show that the relaxation resistance, of recent interest, is quantized for large η. For finite η>ηc we find that a certain average of the relaxation resistance is quantized. We propose a box experiment to measure a quantized noise.

URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.166803
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.166803
PACS: 73.23.Ra, 05.40.-a, 05.60.Gg, 73.23.Hk


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