Fingerprinting the Electronic Wavefunctions of Ultra-Small Conductors

TL;DR

This paper extends the Orthodox Coulomb blockade theory to nano-scale effects, revealing that tunneling spectra of metallic nanoislands encode detailed information about electronic wavefunctions, leading to observable phenomena like resonance renormalization and level interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework incorporating environmental electric fields, enabling extraction of wavefunction details from tunneling spectra of ultra-small conductors.

Findings

Tunneling resonances are renormalized and exhibit Gaussian fluctuations.

Level bending and avoided crossings are predicted phenomena.

Spectra contain information on electronic wavefunctions near the surface.

Abstract

By extending the Orthodox theory of Coulomb blockade to include the nano-scale effects of environmental electric fields, we show that tunneling spectra of metallic nanoislands contain information not only on the energies of the electronic levels but also on their wavefunctions near the surface of the island. This fundamental additional information is predicted to take the form of new observable phenomena that are beyond the scope of the standard Orthodox theory: the tunneling resonances are renormalized and show nearly-Gaussian fluctuations, level bending and avoided crossings.