Can universal conductance fluctuations (UCFs) be observed at temperatures above room temperature at nanoscale?

We report conductance fluctuation in VO2 nano-ribbons of 10 nm thickness at moderate temperatures. Synthesis of these nano-ribbons was reported elsewhere [1-4]. The fluctuations are periodic at room temperature up to the VO2 transition temperature of 70 oC. These are surprising results since dc currents are producing a.c. potential difference values in i-v characteristics of the nano-ribbons of VO2 contrary to those of normal bulk materials. Three main theories were considered in order to explain these findings (1) The LRC equivalent circuit theory (2) the Gunn effect [5] and (3) the Universal Conductance Fluctuations theories [6-15]. The first two theories failed to explain our experimental data. We have explained this anomalous behaviour by the third theory which is a manifestation of the wave nature of electrons. The wave nature of electrons has been demonstrated in many instances including the Nobel–prize–winning Davisson & Germer experiment on electron diffraction. In electronic circuits, quantum interference in metallic wires [6-8], the so-called ‘weak localization’ [9,10] and universal conductance fluctuations (UCF) [11-13] are all manifestations of this wave nature. Fluctuations originate from coherence effects for electronic wave–functions and thus the phase–coherence length, lf needs to be smaller than the momentum relaxation length lm. UCF is more profound when electrical transport is in the weak localization regime lf < lc ="M" g0="2e2/h">