Effect of the Coulomb interaction on the electron relaxation of weakly-confined quantum dot systems

Abstract

We study acoustic-phonon-induced relaxation of charge excitations in single and tunnel-coupled quantum dots containing few confined interacting electrons. The Full Configuration Interaction approach is used to account for the electron-electron repulsion. Electron-phonon interaction is accounted for through both deformation potential and piezoelectric field mechanisms. We show that electronic correlations generally reduce intradot and interdot transition rates with respect to corresponding single-electron transitions, but this effect is lessened by external magnetic fields. On the other hand, piezoelectric field scattering is found to become the dominant relaxation mechanism as the number of confined electrons increases. Previous proposals to strongly suppress electron-phonon coupling in properly designed single-electron quantum dots are shown to hold also in multi-electron devices. Our results indicate that few-electron orbital degrees of freedom are more stable than single-electron ones.

20 pages (preprint format), 7 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. B

References in corpus (3)

• Full configuration interaction approach to the few-electron problem in artificial atoms
• Charge qubit dynamics in a double quantum dot coupled to phonons
• Phonon-induced electron relaxation in weakly-confined single and coupled quantum dots

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Triplet-Singlet Spin Relaxation in Quantum Dots with Spin-Orbit Coupling
• Effect of electron-electron interaction on the phonon-mediated spin relaxation in quantum dots
• High-precision real-space simulation of electrostatically-confined few-electron states
• Signatures of molecular correlations in the few-electron dynamics of coupled quantum dots
• Chiral Spin Textures of Strongly Interacting Particles in Quantum Dots