Negative differential resistance in nanoscale transport in the Coulomb blockade

TL;DR

This paper investigates how electron-electron interactions in coupled quantum dots can induce negative differential resistance in nanoscale transport, expanding understanding of Coulomb blockade phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a master equation approach to analyze how interactions modify transport, revealing conditions for NDR in quantum dot systems.

Findings

Electron-electron interactions can induce NDR in quantum dot transport.

Charging energy influences the transition from Coulomb blockade to NDR.

The model aligns with recent experimental observations.

Abstract

Motivated by recent experiments, we have studied transport behavior of coupled quantum dot systems in the Coulomb blockade regime using the master (rate) equation approach. We explore how electron-electron interactions in a donor-acceptor system, resembling weakly coupled quantum dots with varying charging energy, can modify the systems response to an external bias, taking it from normal Coulomb blockade behavior to negative differential resistance (NDR) in the curent-voltage characteristics.