Metastability and quantum coherence-assisted sensing in interacting parallel quantum dots

We study the transient dynamics subject to quantum coherence effects of two interacting parallel quantum dots weakly coupled to macroscopic leads. The stationary particle current of this quantum system is sensitive to perturbations much smaller than any other energy scale, specifically compared to the system-lead coupling and the temperature. We show that this is due to the presence of a parity-like symmetry in the dynamics, as a consequence of which, two distinct stationary states arise. In the presence of small perturbations breaking this symmetry, the system exhibits metastability with two metastable phases that can be approximated by a combination of states corresponding to stationary states in the unperturbed limit. Furthermore, the long-time dynamics can be described as classical dynamics between those phases, leading to a unique stationary state. In particular, the competition of those two metastable phases explains the sensitive behavior of the stationary current towards small perturbations. We show that this behavior bears the potential of utilizing the parallel dots as a charge sensor which makes use of quantum coherence effects to achieve a signal to noise ratio that is not limited by the temperature. As a consequence, the parallel dots outperform an analogous single-dot charge sensor for a wide range of temperatures.