Coulomb blockade without potential barriers

Abstract

We study transport through a strongly correlated quantum dot and show that Coulomb blockade can appear even in the presence of perfect contacts. This conclusion arises from numerical calculations of the conductance for a microscopic model of spinless fermions in an interacting chain connected to each lead via a completely open channel. The dependence of the conductance on the gate voltage shows well defined Coulomb blockade peaks which are sharpened as the interaction strength is increased. Our numerics is based on the embedding method and the DMRG algorithm. We explain the emergence of Coulomb blockade with perfect contacts by a reduction of the effective coupling matrix elements between many-body states corresponding to successive particle numbers in the interacting region. A perturbative approach, valid in the strong interaction limit, yields an analytic expression for the interaction-induced suppression of the conductance in the Coulomb blockade regime.

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References in corpus (3)

• Residual conductance of correlated one-dimensional nanosystems: A numerical approach
• Interacting electron systems between Fermi leads: effective one-body transmissions and correlation clouds
• What is the value of the superconducting gap of a F/S/F trilayer ?

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Strong enhancement of transport by interaction on contact links
• Detection of interaction-induced nonlocal effects using perfectly transmitting nanostructures
• Conductance of nano-systems with interactions coupled via conduction electrons: Effect of indirect exchange interactions
• Effect of measurement probes upon the conductance of an interacting nanosystem: Detection of an attached ring by non local many body effects