Single grain heating due to inelastic cotunneling

Abstract

We study heating effects of a single metallic quantum dot weakly coupled to two leads. The dominant mechanism for heating at low temperatures is due to inelastic electron cotunneling processes. We calculate the grain temperature profile as a function of grain parameters, bias voltage, and time and show that for nanoscale size grains the heating effects are pronounced and easily measurable in experiments.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, revtex4, extended and corrected versio