Interplay of charge and heat transport in a nano-junction in the out-of-equilibrium cotunneling regime

TL;DR

This paper investigates how charge and heat transfer are interconnected in a nano-junction under out-of-equilibrium conditions, revealing the sensitivity of transport to bosonic mode spectra.

Contribution

It introduces a coupled kinetic equation approach to analyze electron and phonon interactions in a nano-junction during cotunneling, highlighting the impact of bosonic spectra.

Findings

Transport is highly sensitive to bosonic mode spectrum.

Derived self-consistent current-voltage characteristics.

Quantified heat fluxes between electrons, excitations, and phonons.

Abstract

We study the charge transport and the heat transfer through a nano-junction composed of a small metallic grain weakly coupled to two metallic leads. We focus on the cotunneling regime out-of-equilibrium, where the bias voltage and the temperature gradient between the leads strongly drive electron and phonon degrees of freedom in the grain that in turn have a strong feedback on the transport through the grain. We derive and solve coupled kinetic equations for electron and phonon degrees of freedom in the grain. We obtain the heat fluxes between cotunneling electrons, bosonic electron-hole excitations in the grain, and phonons, and self-consistently find the current-voltage characteristics. We demonstrate that the transport in the nano-junction is very sensitive to the spectrum of the bosonic modes in the grain.