Interplay of charge and heat transport in a nano-junction in the out-of-equilibrium cotunneling regime

Abstract

We study the charge transport and the heat transfer through a nano-junction composed of a small metallic grain weakly coupled to two metallic leads. We focus on the cotunneling regime out-of-equilibrium, where the bias voltage and the temperature gradient between the leads strongly drive electron and phonon degrees of freedom in the grain that in turn have a strong feedback on the transport through the grain. We derive and solve coupled kinetic equations for electron and phonon degrees of freedom in the grain. We obtain the heat fluxes between cotunneling electrons, bosonic electron-hole excitations in the grain, and phonons, and self-consistently find the current-voltage characteristics. We demonstrate that the transport in the nano-junction is very sensitive to the spectrum of the bosonic modes in the grain.

9 pages, 3 figures

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• Jumps in current-voltage characteristics in disordered films
• Isosbestic points in the spectral function of correlated electrons
• Giant current fluctuations in an overheated single electron transistor
• Heating Effects in a Chain of Quantum Dots
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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Electron transfer across a thermal gradient
• Impact of capacitance and tunneling asymmetries on Coulomb blockade edges and Kondo peaks in non-equilibrium transport through molecular quantum dots
• Statistics of energy dissipation in a quantum dot operating in the cotunneling regime