ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the weak-localization contribution to the conductivity in the position representation, before turning to discuss the effects of interactions on the weak-localization effect, the destruction of the phase coherence of the wave function due to electron-phonon and electron-electron interaction. It presents the anomalous magnetoresistance and the weak-localization Aharonov-Bohm effect. When calculating the weak localization phase-breaking rate we must therefore pay special attention to the low-energy electron-electron interaction. In a thin film or in the two-dimensional case the energy relaxation rate even diverged in perturbation theory, due to the abundance of collisions with small energy transfer. An elegant verification of the weak antilocalization effect was demonstrated in experiments by Bergmann, where a thin film of magnesium where spin-orbit scattering is absent, were covered with an increasing amount of a submonolayer of gold, thereby increasing the spin-orbit scattering.
