Non-adiabatic transport in a quantum dot turnstile

TL;DR

This paper provides a theoretical analysis of electron transport in a quantum dot turnstile driven by time-dependent signals, highlighting transient effects, efficiency issues, and the role of energy sidebands in the system.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed Keldysh formalism-based model for transient and steady-state currents in a multi-level quantum dot under time-dependent driving, including high-frequency effects.

Findings

Transient currents show significant features during initial cycles.

Efficiency as a pump is low during transient regime due to charge absorption.

Satellite peaks in current are observed in both transient and steady states.

Abstract

We present a theoretical study of the electronic transport through a many-level quantum dot driven by time-dependent signals applied at the contacts to the leads. If the barriers oscillate out of phase the system operates like a turnstile pump under a finite constant bias, as observed in the experiments of Kouwenhoven {\it et al.} [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 67}, 1626 (1991)]. The time-dependent currents and their averages over succesive pumping periods are computed from the Keldysh formalism for tight-binding models. The calculation considers a sudden application of the pumping potentials at $t=0$ which leads to transient features of the time-dependent and averaged currents during the first pumping cycles which turn out to be important in the high-frequency regime. We show that in the transient regime the efficiency of the system as a pump is rather poor because it mainly absorbs charge from both leads in order to fill the levels located below the bias window. Under a finite bias and a low-frequency pumping signal the charge transferred across the system depends on the number of levels located within the bias window. The internal charge dynamics and the role of energy sidebands are investigated. The so called satellite peaks of the averaged current are observed also in the transient regime.