English

Spin-valley blockade in carbon nanotube double quantum dots

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2015-03-17 v2

Abstract

We present a theoretical study of the Pauli or spin-valley blockade for double quantum dots in semiconducting carbon nanotubes. In our model we take into account the following characteristic features of carbon nanotubes: (i) fourfold (spin and valley) degeneracy of the quantum dot levels, (ii) the intrinsic spin-orbit interaction which is enhanced by the tube curvature, and (iii) valley-mixing due to short-range disorder, i.e., substitutional atoms, adatoms, etc. We find that the spin-valley blockade can be lifted in the presence of short-range disorder, which induces two independent random (in magnitude and direction) valley-Zeeman-fields in the two dots, and hence acts similarly to hyperfine interaction in conventional semiconductor quantum dots. In the case of strong spin-orbit interaction, we identify a parameter regime where the current as the function of an applied axial magnetic field shows a zero-field dip with a width controlled by the interdot tunneling amplitude, in agreement with recent experiments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1005.2738,
  title  = {Spin-valley blockade in carbon nanotube double quantum dots},
  author = {András Pályi and Guido Burkard},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1005.2738},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

15 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables; v2: published version

R2 v1 2026-06-21T15:23:22.481Z