Abstract
We point out a novel, nonuniversal contribution to the dephasing rate of conduction electrons in metallic systems: scattering off nonmagnetic two-level systems (TLSs) having almost degenerate Kondo ground states. In the regime ( , ), such TLSs exhibit non-Fermi-liquid physics that can cause , which generally decreases with decreasing , to seemingly saturate in a limited temperature range before vanishing for . This could explain the saturation of dephasing recently observed in gold wires [Mohanty et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 3366 (1997)].
- Received 12 February 1999
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.83.2632
©1999 American Physical Society