Phonon-assisted tunneling in an isolated double dot system

TL;DR

This paper investigates phonon-assisted tunneling in a well isolated double quantum dot system, highlighting the dominant piezoelectric flexural mode contributions and the impact of slab thickness on tunneling rates.

Contribution

It introduces a separable potential model for accurate wavefunction and energy calculations, revealing how phonon-assisted tunneling rates depend on system parameters.

Findings

Piezoelectric flexural modes dominate at small energies.

Tunneling rates increase significantly with decreasing slab thickness.

Predicted rates can be up to 100 times higher in thin slabs.

Abstract

Phonon-assisted tunneling rates are evaluated for a well isolated double dot system defined in a GaAs semiconductor heterostructure of finite thickness. A separable model for the confining potential allows accurate determinations of doublet electron wavefunctions and energies. It is found that at small doublet energies the piezoelectric rates due to flexural modes give the dominant contribution. For small slab thicknesses the predicted rates are up to two orders of magnitude higher than for very thick slabs.