Quantum transport of double quantum dots coupled to an oscillator in arbitrary strong coupling regime

TL;DR

This paper studies quantum transport in double quantum dots coupled to a nanomechanical resonator, revealing how strong electron-phonon interactions can both enhance and suppress electron flow through phonon-assisted tunneling.

Contribution

It introduces a non-perturbative method using the coherent phonon states to analyze electron-phonon interactions in quantum transport at arbitrary coupling strengths.

Findings

Phonon-assisted resonant tunneling occurs at specific energy conditions.

Multi-phonon excitations can enhance transport in strong coupling regimes.

Increasing electron-phonon coupling initially aids then suppresses transport.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the quantum transport of a double quantum dot coupled with a nanomechanical resonator at arbitrary strong electron-phonon coupling regimes. We employ the generalized quantum master equation to study full counting statistics of currents. We demonstrate the coherent phonon states method can be applied to decouple the electron-phonon interaction non-perturbatively. With the help of this non-perturbative treatment of electron-phonon couplings, we find that the phonon-assisted resonant tunneling emerges when the excess energy from the left quantum dot to the right one can excite integer number of phonons and multi-phonon excitations can enhance the transport in strong electron-phonon coupling regime. Moreover, we find that as the electron-phonon coupling increases, it first plays a constructive role to assist the transport, and then plays the role of scattering and strongly represses the transport.