146 research outputs found
Orbital ferromagnetism in interacting few-electron dots with strong spin-orbit coupling
We study the ground state of weakly interacting electrons (with ) in a two-dimensional parabolic quantum dot with strong Rashba spin-orbit
coupling. Using dimensionless parameters for the Coulomb interaction,
, and the Rashba coupling, , the low-energy
physics is characterized by an almost flat single-particle dispersion. From an
analytical approach for and , and from numerical exact
diagonalization and Hartree-Fock calculations, we find a transition from a
conventional unmagnetized ground state (for ) to an orbital
ferromagnet (for ), with a large magnetization and a
circulating charge current. We show that the critical interaction strength,
, vanishes in the limit .Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures; (v2) more discussion added, fig.8 correcte
Critical Josephson current through a bistable single-molecule junction
We compute the critical Josephson current through a single-molecule junction.
As a model for a molecule with a bistable conformational degree of freedom, we
study an interacting single-level quantum dot coupled to a two-level system and
weakly connected to two superconducting electrodes. We perform a lowest-order
perturbative calculation of the critical current and show that it can
significantly change due to the two-level system. In particular, the
\pi-junction behavior, generally present for strong interactions, can be
completely suppressed.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures; v2: minor changes, to be published in Phys. Rev.
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