A M JAYANNAVAR

Institute of Physics, Sachivalaya Marg, Bhubaneswar 751 005, India

Email: jayan@iopb.res.in

Abstract.

We present a simple model of transmission across a metallic mesoscopic ring. In one of its arm an electron interacts with a single magnetic impurity via an exchange coupling. We show that entanglement between electron and spin impurity states leads to reduction of Aharonov--Bohm oscillations in the transmission coefficient. The spin-conductance is asymmetric in the flux reversal as opposed to the two-probe electrical conductance which is symmetric. In the same model, in contradiction to the naive expectation of a current magnification effect, we observe enhancement as well as suppression of this effect depending on the system parameters. The limitations of this model to the general notion of dephasing or decoherence in quantum systems are pointed out.

Keywords:  Entanglement; Aharonov--Bohm effect; spin-conductance; dephasing; decoherence; current magnification.

Pacs Nos.  73.23.-b; 05.60.Gg; 72.10.-d; 03.65.Bz