467 research outputs found
Rate of equilibration of a one-dimensional Wigner crystal
We consider a system of one-dimensional spinless particles interacting via
long-range repulsion. In the limit of strong interactions the system is a
Wigner crystal, with excitations analogous to phonons in solids. In a harmonic
crystal the phonons do not interact, and the system never reaches thermal
equilibrium. We account for the anharmonism of the Wigner crystal and find the
rate at which it approaches equilibrium. The full equilibration of the system
requires umklapp scattering of phonons, resulting in exponential suppression of
the equilibration rate at low temperatures.Comment: Prepared for the proceedings of the International School and Workshop
on Electronic Crystals, ECRYS-201
Fractional plateaus in the Coulomb blockade of coupled quantum dots
Ground-state properties of a double-large-dot sample connected to a reservoir
via a single-mode point contact are investigated. When the interdot
transmission is perfect and the dots controlled by the same dimensionless gate
voltage, we find that for any finite backscattering from the barrier between
the lead and the left dot, the average dot charge exhibits a Coulomb-staircase
behavior with steps of size e/2 and the capacitance peak period is halved. The
interdot electrostatic coupling here is weak. For strong tunneling between the
left dot and the lead, we report a conspicuous intermediate phase in which the
fractional plateaus get substantially altered by an increasing slope.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, final versio
Effective action and interaction energy of coupled quantum dots
We obtain the effective action of tunnel-coupled quantum dots, by modeling
the system as a Luttinger liquid with multiple barriers. For a double dot
system, we find that the resonance conditions for perfect conductance form a
hexagon in the plane of the two gate voltages controlling the density of
electrons in each dot. We also explicitly obtain the functional dependence of
the interaction energy and peak-splitting on the gate voltage controlling
tunneling between the dots and their charging energies. Our results are in good
agreement with recent experimental results, from which we obtain the Luttinger
interaction parameter .Comment: 5 pgs,latex,3 figs,revised version to be publshed in Phys.Rev.
Scaling Of The Coulomb Energy Due To Quantum Fluctuations In The Charge Of A Quantum Dot
The charging energy of a quantum dot is measured through the effect of its
potential on the conductance of a second dot. This technique allows a
measurement of the scaling of the dot's charging energy with the conductance of
the tunnel barriers leading to the dot. We find that the charging energy scales
quadratically with the reflection probability of the barriers. In a second
experiment we study the transition from a single to a double-dot which exhibits
a scaling behavior linear in the reflection probability. The observed
power-laws agree with a recent theory.Comment: 5 pages, uuencoded and compressed postscript file, with figure
Strong Tunneling in Double-Island Structures
We study the electron transport through a system of two low-capacitance metal
islands connected in series between two electrodes. The work is motivated in
part by experiments on semiconducting double-dots, which show intriguing
effects arising from coherent tunneling of electrons and mixing of the
single-electron states across tunneling barriers. In this article, we show how
coherent tunneling affects metallic systems and leads to a mixing of the
macroscopic charge states across the barriers. We apply a recently formulated
RG approach to examine the linear response of the system with high tunnel
conductances (up to 8e^2/h). In addition we calculate the (second order)
cotunneling contributions to the non-linear conductance. Our main results are
that the peaks in the linear and nonlinear conductance as a function of the
gate voltage are reduced and broadened in an asymmetric way, as well as shifted
in their positions. In the limit where the two islands are coupled weakly to
the electrodes, we compare to theoretical results obtained by Golden and
Halperin and Matveev et al. In the opposite case when the two islands are
coupled more strongly to the leads than to each other, the peaks are found to
shift, in qualitative agreement with the recent prediction of Andrei et al. for
a similar double-dot system which exhibits a phase transition.Comment: 12 page
Weak Charge Quantization on Superconducting Islands
We consider the Coulomb blockade on a superconductive quantum dot strongly
coupled to a lead through a tunnelling barrier and/or normal diffusive metal.
Andreev transport of the correlated pairs leads to quantum fluctuations of the
charge on the dot. These fluctuations result in exponential renormalization of
the effective charging energy. We employ two complimentary ways to approach the
problem, leading to the coinciding results: the instanton and the functional RG
treatment of the non-linear sigma model. We also derive the charging energy
renormalization in terms of arbitrary transmission matrix of the multi-channel
interface.Comment: 21 pages, 4 eps figures, RevTe
Coulomb blockade of strongly coupled quantum dots studied via bosonization of a channel with a finite barrier
A pair of quantum dots, coupled through a point contact, can exhibit Coulomb
blockade effects that reflect an oscillatory term in the dots' total energy
whose value depends on whether the total number of electrons on the dots is
even or odd. The effective energy associated with this even-odd alternation is
reduced, relative to the bare Coulomb blockade energy for uncoupled dots, by a
factor (1-f) that decreases as the interdot coupling is increased. When the
transmission coefficient for interdot electronic motion is independent of
energy and the same for all channels within the point contact (which are
assumed uncoupled), the factor (1-f) takes on a universal value determined
solely by the number of channels and the dimensionless conductance g of each
individual channel.
This paper studies corrections to the universal value of (1-f) that result
when the transmission coefficent varies over energy scales of the size of the
bare Coulomb blockade energy. We consider a model in which the point contact is
described by a single orbital channel containing a parabolic barrier potential,
and we calculate the leading correction to (1-f) for one-channel (spin-split)
and two-channel (spin-degenerate) point contacts in the limit where the single
orbital channel is almost completely open. By generalizing a previously used
bosonization technique, we find that, for a given value of the dimensionless
conductance g, the value of (1-f) is increased relative to its value for a
zero-thickness barrier, but the absolute value of the increase is small in the
region where our calculations apply.Comment: 13 pages, 3 Postscript figure
Coulomb Blockade of Tunneling Through a Double Quantum Dot
We study the Coulomb blockade of tunneling through a double quantum dot. The
temperature dependence of the linear conductance is strongly affected by the
inter-dot tunneling. As the tunneling grows, a crossover from
temperature-independent peak conductance to a power-law suppression of
conductance at low temperatures is predicted. This suppression is a
manifestation of the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe associated with the
charge re-distribution between the dots, which accompanies the tunneling of an
electron into a dot. We find analytically the shapes of the Coulomb blockade
peaks in conductance as a function of gate voltage.Comment: 11 pages, revtex3.0 and multicols.sty, 4 figures uuencode
Resonant tunneling and the multichannel Kondo problem: the quantum Brownian motion description
We study mesoscopic resonant tunneling as well as multichannel Kondo problems
by mapping them to a first-quantized quantum mechanical model of a particle
moving in a multi-dimensional periodic potential with Ohmic dissipation. From a
renormalization group analysis, we obtain phase diagrams of the quantum
Brownian motion model with various lattice symmetries. For a symmorphic
lattice, there are two phases at T=0: a localized phase in which the particle
is trapped in a potential minimum, and a free phase in which the particle is
unaffected by the periodic potential. For a non-symmorphic lattice, however,
there may be an additional intermediate phase in which the particle is neither
localized nor completely free. The fixed point governing the intermediate phase
is shown to be identical to the well-known multichannel Kondo fixed point in
the Toulouse limit as well as the resonance fixed point of a quantum dot model
and a double-barrier Luttinger liquid model. The mapping allows us to compute
the fixed-poing mobility of the quantum Brownian motion model exactly,
using known conformal-field-theory results of the Kondo problem. From the
mobility, we find that the peak value of the conductance resonance of a
spin-1/2 quantum dot problem is given by . The scaling form of the
resonance line shape is predicted
Thermopower of a single electron transistor in the regime of strong inelastic cotunneling
We study Coulomb blockade oscillations of thermoelectric coefficients of a
single electron transistor based on a quantum dot strongly coupled to one of
the leads by a quantum point contact. At temperatures below the charging energy
E_C the transport of electrons is dominated by strong inelastic cotunneling. In
this regime we find analytic expressions for the thermopower as a function of
temperature T and the reflection amplitude in the contact. In the case when
the electron spins are polarized by a strong external magnetic field, the
thermopower shows sinusoidal oscillations as a function of the gate voltage
with the amplitude of the order of . We obtain
qualitatively different results in the absence of the magnetic field. At
temperatures between and the thermopower oscillations are
sinusoidal with the amplitude of order . On the
other hand, at we find non-sinusoidal oscillations of the
thermopower with the amplitude .Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure
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