Resonant Tunneling in a Dissipative Environment

We measure tunneling through a single quantum level in a carbon nanotube quantum dot connected to resistive metal leads. For the electrons tunneling to/from the nanotube, the leads serve as a dissipative environment, which suppresses the tunneling rate. In the regime of sequential tunneling, the height of the single-electron conductance peaks increases as the temperature is lowered, although it scales more weekly than the conventional 1/T. In the resonant tunneling regime (temperature smaller than the level width), the peak width approaches saturation, while the peak height starts to decrease. Overall, the peak height shows a non-monotonic temperature dependence. We associate this unusual behavior with the transition from the sequential to the resonant tunneling through a single quantum level in a dissipative environment.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Observation of the Kondo Screening Cloud of Micron Lengths

When a magnetic impurity exists in a metal, conduction electrons form a spin cloud that screens the impurity spin. This basic phenomenon is called the Kondo effect. Contrary to electric charge screening, the spin screening cloud occurs quantum coherently, forming spin-singlet entanglement with the impurity. Although the spins interact locally around the impurity, the cloud can spread out over micrometers. The Kondo cloud has never been detected to date, and its existence, a fundamental aspect of the Kondo effect, remains as a long-standing controversial issue. Here we present experimental evidence of a Kondo cloud extending over a length of micrometers comparable to the theoretical length $\xi_\mathrm{K}$. In our device, a Kondo impurity is formed in a quantum dot (QD), one-sided coupling to a quasi-one dimensional channel~\cite{Theory_Proposal_HS} that houses a Fabry-Perot (FP) interferometer of various gate-defined lengths $L > 1 \, \mu$m. When we sweep a voltage on the interferometer end gate separated from the QD by the length $L$ to induce FP oscillations in conductance, we observe oscillations in measured Kondo temperature $T_\mathrm{K}$, a sign of the cloud at distance $L$. For $L \lesssim \xi_\mathrm{K}$ the $T_\mathrm{K}$ oscillation amplitude becomes larger for the smaller $L$, obeying a scaling function of a single parameter $L/ \xi_\mathrm{K}$, while for $L>\xi_\mathrm{K}$ the oscillation is much weaker. The result reveals that $\xi_\mathrm{K}$ is the only length parameter associated with the Kondo effect, and that the cloud lies mostly inside the length $\xi_\mathrm{K}$ which reaches microns. Our experimental method of using electron interferometers offers a way of detecting the spatial distribution of exotic non-Fermi liquids formed by multiple magnetic impurities or multiple screening channels and solving long-standing issues of spin-correlated systems.Comment: Main text: 13 pages, 3 figures. Supplementary text: 14 pages, 6 figure