paper

A Quantum Singlet Pump

arXiv:0710.2953 · doi:10.1088/0953-8984/20/45/455202

Abstract

We provide provide a detailed study of biasless coherent transport of singlet electron pairs in one-dimensional (1D) channels induced by electron-electron interactions that are time-varying in certain spatially localized regions of the channel. When the time variation is cyclic, the mechanism is analogous to the adiabatic quantum pumping of charge and spin previously studied. However, the presence of interactions that vary only in localized regions of space requires an intrinsically two-body description which is irreducible to the 1D single particle scattering matrix elements that are sufficient to describe quantum pumping of charge and spin. Here we derive a generalized theory for the pumping of such interacting pairs starting from first principles. We show that the standard description of charge pumping is contained within our more broadly applicable expressions. We then apply our general results to a concrete lattice model and obtain an exact analytical expression for the pumped singlet current. We further demonstrate that such a model can be implemented with a chain of currently available quantum dots with certain minor modifications that we suggest; we present a detailed numerical feasibility analysis of the characteristics of such experimentally realizable quantum dots, showing that the requirements for a measurable pumped singlet current are within experimental range.

16 pages, 6 figures

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