Phase of Aharonov-Bohm oscillations in conductance of mesoscopic systems

Abstract

Motivated by a recent experiment we analyze in detail the phase of Aharonov-Bohm oscillations across a 1D ring with a stub coupled to one of its arms, in the presence of a magnetic flux. We demonstrate that there are two kinds of conductance extremas. One class of them are fixed at particular flux values and can only change abruptly from a maxima to a minima as incident energy is varied. We show a different mechanism for such abrupt phase change in conductance oscillation. We demonstrate that these extremas can exhibit "phase locking". However, the second kind of extremas can shift continuously as the incident energy is varied.