Oscillatory instabilities in d.c. biased quantum dots

Abstract

We consider a `quantum dot' in the Coulomb blockade regime, subject to an arbitrarily large source-drain voltage V. When V is small, quantum dots with odd electron occupation display the Kondo effect, giving rise to enhanced conductance. Here we investigate the regime where V is increased beyond the Kondo temperature and the Kondo resonance splits into two components. It is shown that interference between them results in spontaneous oscillations of the current through the dot. The theory predicts the appearance of ``Shapiro steps'' in the current-voltage characteristics of an irradiated quantum dot; these would constitute an experimental signature of the predicted effect.

Four pages with embedded figures

References in corpus (1)

• Is the quantum dot at large bias a weak-coupling problem?

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Probing spin and orbital Kondo effects with a mesoscopic interferometer
• Transient currents and universal timescales for a fully time-dependent quantum dot in the Kondo regime
• Fate of the spin-\frac{1}{2} Kondo effect in the presence of temperature gradients
• Two-channel Kondo tunneling in triple quantum dot