The Physics of Mesoscopic Systems

An ongoing tendency in modern material science is to propose and to investigate systems containing smaller and smaller structures. The resulting systems approach the mesoscopic regime in which the quan-tum phase coherence leads to important corrections to the electronic properties of the devices. At the same time, microscopic details of the sample, like the exact impurity conguration in disordered systems, determine some quantitative features of the behavior. This can lead to pronounced uctuations of a quantity measured in dierent samples which are macroscopically equivalent. This aim of this series of lectures is to introduce the mesoscopic regime and to review a selection of the most important eects ap-pearing in mesoscopic systems. The theory of electronic transport in mesoscopic samples is illustrated in the framework of the Lan-dauer approach in which the conductance is determined by the scat