On the cotunneling regime of interacting quantum dots

Abstract

Consider a bunch of interacting electrons confined in a quantum dot. The later is suddenly coupled to semi-infinite biased leads at an initial instant $t=0$. We identify the dominant contribution to the ergodic current in the off-resonant transport regime, in which the discrete spectrum of the quantum dot is well separated from the absolutely continuous spectrum of the leads. Our approach allows for arbitrary strength of the electron-electron interaction while the current is expanded in even powers of the (weak) lead-dot hopping constant $\tau$. We provide explicit calculations for sequential tunneling and cotunneling contributions to the current. In the interacting case it turns out that the cotunneling current depends on the initial many-body configuration of the sample, while in the non-interacting case it does not, and coincides with the first term in the expansion of the Landauer formula w.r.t $\tau$.

To appear in Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical

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• Non-equilibrium steady-states for interacting open systems: exact results
• Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics and Steady State Density Matrix for Quantum Open Systems
• On the steady state correlation functions of open interacting systems
• Nonequilibrium density matrix for simultaneous heat and charge steady-state transport in quantum open systems
• Memory effects in non-interacting mesoscopic transport
• A mathematical account of the NEGF formalism
• On the self-consistent Landauer-Büttiker formalism