ABSTRACT
The problem of an interacting electron gas in disordered metallic conductors is one of the most important and complicated problems in modern condensed matter physics. The complexity of this problem is primarily due to a necessity to simultaneously take into account electron scattering on impurities, long-range electron–electron interactions, and Fermi statistics. An alternative and fully equivalent way is to express the action via the evolution operators for electrons propagating in the fluctuating electromagnetic potentials. This approach turns out to be particularly convenient for the analysis of transport properties of various spatially confined conductors, such as tunnel junctions and quantum dots. The effect of electron–electron interactions on transport properties of disordered conductors is often analyzed with the aid of the Keldysh diagrammatic technique.
