English

Inelastic cotunneling in quantum dots and molecules with weakly broken degeneracies

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2011-06-03 v2

Abstract

We calculate the nonlinear cotunneling conductance through interacting quantum dot systems in the deep Coulomb blockade regime using a rate equation approach based on the T-matrix formalism, which shows in the concerned regions very good agreement with a generalized master equation approach. Our focus is on inelastic cotunneling in systems with weakly broken degeneracies, such as complex quantum dots or molecules. We find for these systems a characteristic gate dependence of the non-equilibrium cotunneling conductance. While on one side of a Coulomb diamond the conductance decreases after the inelastic cotunneling threshold towards its saturation value, on the other side it increases monotonously even after the threshold. We show that this behavior originates from an asymmetric gate voltage dependence of the effective cotunneling amplitudes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1003.5834,
  title  = {Inelastic cotunneling in quantum dots and molecules with weakly broken degeneracies},
  author = {Georg Begemann and Sonja Koller and Milena Grifoni and Jens Paaske},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1003.5834},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

12 pages, 12 figures; revised published version

R2 v1 2026-06-21T15:04:32.864Z