Helping set the nanorecord straight
Mukunda P. Das · Physics World · 2007
In his article “Quantum ballistics” (August pp27–30), Andrei Sokolov claims that in 1957 the late Rolf Landauer predicted the electrical conductance of a narrow 1D conductor is quantized in units of 2 e 2 /h , where e is the electronic charge, h is Planck's constant and the factor of two reflects the fact that electrons have two possible spin orientations: “up” or “down”. A perceptive reader will never find this formula for quantized conductance in Rolf Landauer's 1957 paper ( IBM J. Res. Dev . 1 223). However, this seriously mistaken notion has entered into many research papers and textbooks.