Electron Cotunneling in a Semiconductor Quantum Dot
Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
2009-10-31 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons
Abstract
We report transport measurements on a semiconductor quantum dot with a small number of confined electrons. In the Coulomb blockade regime, conduction is dominated by cotunneling processes. These can be either elastic or inelastic, depending on whether they leave the dot in its ground state or drive it into an excited state, respectively. We are able to discriminate between these two contributions and show that inelastic events can occur only if the applied bias exceeds the lowest excitation energy. Implications to energy-level spectroscopy are discussed.
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0007448,
title = {Electron Cotunneling in a Semiconductor Quantum Dot},
author = {S. De Franceschi and S. Sasaki and J. M. Elzerman and W. G. van der Wiel and S. Tarucha and L. P. Kouwenhoven},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0007448},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
To be published in Phys. Rev. Lett