Thermal transport driven by Coulomb interactions in quantum dots: Enhancement of thermoelectric and heat currents

TL;DR

This paper explores how Coulomb interactions in a double quantum dot system can significantly enhance thermoelectric and heat currents, revealing new energy channels and peak behaviors influenced by electron interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of Coulomb interaction effects on thermal transport in quantum dots using multiple master equation approaches, highlighting the role of energy state crossings.

Findings

Coulomb interactions create additional energy channels that boost currents.

Energy state crossings lead to peaks in thermoelectric and heat currents.

Different master equation methods yield similar results when coherences are negligible.

Abstract

We investigate thermal transport in a serial asymmetric double quantum dot (DQD) coupled to two electron reservoirs with different temperatures. The inter- and intra-Coulomb interactions are taken into account in a Coulomb blockade DQD where the electron sequential tunneling via four different master equation approaches is considered. In the absence of Coulomb interactions, a neglectable thermoelectric and heat currents is found identifying as the Coulomb blockade DQD regime. In the presence of Coulomb interactions, intra- and inter-Coulomb interactions, crossings energies between the intra- and the inter-dot many-body electron states are observed. The crossings induce extra channels in the energy spectrum of the DQD that enhance thermoelectric and heat currents. The extra channels form several peaks in the thermoelectric and heat currents in which intensity and position of the peaks depend on strength of the inter- and intra-dot Coulomb interactions. In addition, the problem of coherences and incoherences are studied using different approaches to the master equation, which are the first order von-Neumann, the Redfield, a first order Lindblad, and the Pauli methods. We find that all methods give almost similar thermal transport when the role of the coherences is irrelevant in the DQD.