Anomalous Conductance Distribution in Quasi-One-Dimensional Gold Wires: Possible Violation of the One-Parameter Scaling Hypothesis

We report measurements of conductance distribution in a set of quasi-one-dimensional gold wires. The distribution includes the second cumulant or the variance which describes the universal conductance fluctuations, and the third cumulant which denotes the leading deviation. We have observed an asymmetric contribution—or, a nonvanishing third cumulant—contrary to the expectation for quasi-one-dimensional systems in the noninteracting theories in the one-parameter scaling framework, which include the perturbative diagrammatic calculations and the random matrix theory