Correlation Effects on Transport Through Few-Electrons Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how electron-electron interactions and magnetic fields influence conductance peaks in a quantum box with few electrons, revealing complex many-body effects on transport properties.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of correlation effects on conductance in few-electron quantum systems under magnetic fields, including computations up to 8 electrons.

Findings

Peak positions and heights are controlled by many-body effects.

Spin selection rules affect conductance peak patterns.

Behavior varies significantly between low and high magnetic fields.

Abstract

We study lateral tunneling through a quantum box including electron-electron interactions in the presence of a magnetic field which breaks single particle degeneracies. The conductance at zero temperature as a function of the Fermi energy in the leads consists of a set of peaks related to changing by one the electron occupancy in the box. We find that the position and heights of the peaks are controlled by many-body effects. We compute the conductance up to 8 electrons for several cases where correlation effects dominate. In the range of intermediate fields spin selection rules quench some peaks. At low and high fields the behavior of the conductance as a function of the number of electrons is very different due to big changes in the many-body ground state wavefunctions.