Mesoscopic physics

Mesoscopic physics is a subdiscipline of condensed matter physics that deals with materials of an intermediate length. The scale of these materials can be described as being between the size of a quantity of atoms (such as a molecule) and of materials measuring micrometres. The lower limit can also be defined as being the size of individual atoms. At the micrometre level are bulk materials. Both mesoscopic and macroscopic objects contain a large number of atoms. Whereas average properties derived from its constituent materials describe macroscopic objects, as they usually obey the laws of classical mechanics, a mesoscopic object, by contrast, is affected by fluctuations around the average, and is subject to quantum mechanics.

In other words, a macroscopic device, when scaled down to a meso-size, starts revealing quantum mechanical properties. For example, at the macroscopic level the conductance of a wire increases continuously with its diameter. However, at the mesoscopic level, the wire's conductance is quantized: the increases occur in discrete, or individual, whole steps. During research, mesoscopic devices are constructed, measured and observed experimentally and theoretically in order to advance understanding of the physics of insulators, semiconductors, metals and superconductors. The applied science of mesoscopic physics deals with the potential of building nanodevices.

Mesoscopic physics also addresses fundamental practical problems which occur when a macroscopic object is miniaturized, as with the miniaturization of transistors in semiconductor electronics. The physical properties of materials change as their size approaches the nanoscale, where the percentage of atoms at the surface of the material becomes significant. For bulk materials larger than one micrometre, the percentage of atoms at the surface is insignificant in relation to the number of atoms in the entire material. The subdiscipline has dealt primarily with artificial structures of metal or semiconducting material which have been fabricated by the techniques employed for producing microelectronic circuits.

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