What is the Thouless Energy for Ballistic Systems?

Abstract

The Thouless energy $E_c$ characterizes numerous quantities associated with sensitivity to boundary conditions in diffusive mesoscopic conductors. What happens to these quantities if the disorder strength is decreased and a transition to the ballistic regime takes place? In the present analysis we refute the intuitively plausible assumption that $E_c$ loses its meaning as an inverse diffusion time through the system at hand and generally disorder independent scales take over. Instead we find that a variety of (thermodynamic) observables are still characterized by the Thouless energy.