Phase-Coherent Transport in Condensed Matter Physics

 Michael R. Geller
 Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Georgia, Athens

 Resistance measurements have long been used as a spectroscopy
 of solids, as have other spectroscopies such as optical absorption.
 For example, a measurement of the tunneling current through a small
 metal or semiconductor structure as a function of temperature,
 voltage, and magnetic field, yields information about the electronic
 many-body states present there. Unfortunately, important information
 is lost in conventional tunneling spectroscopy because only the
 amplitude of the complex-valued transmission coefficient is measured.
 Recently, a series of beautiful experiments have succeeded in
 measuring the phase information. In this talk I will discuss these
 experiments and their theoretical interpretation.