Mesoscopic quantum transport: Resonant tunneling in the presence of strong Coulomb interaction

TL;DR

This paper investigates how quantum fluctuations influence electron transport in mesoscopic metallic junctions, revealing energy renormalization effects, lifetime broadening impacts, and persistent inelastic cotunneling at low temperatures.

Contribution

It develops a real-time diagrammatic approach with nonperturbative resummation to analyze quantum fluctuations in resonant tunneling with strong Coulomb interactions.

Findings

Energy renormalization causes logarithmic temperature dependence.

Finite lifetime broadening flattens Coulomb oscillations.

Inelastic cotunneling persists in Coulomb blockade regime.

Abstract

Coulomb blockade phenomena and quantum fluctuations are studied in mesoscopic metallic tunnel junctions with high charging energies. If the resistance of the barriers is large compared to the quantum resistance, transport can be described by sequential tunneling. Here we study the influence of quantum fluctuations. They are important when the resistance is small or the temperature very low. A real-time approach is developed which allows the diagrammatic classification of ``inelastic resonant tunneling'' processes where different electrons tunnel coherently back and forth between the leads and the metallic island. With the help of a nonperturbative resummation technique we evaluate the spectral density which describes the charge excitations of the system. From it physical quantities of interest like current and average charge can be deduced. Our main conclusions are: An energy renormalization leads to a logarithmic temperature dependence of the renormalized system parameters. A finite lifetime broadening can change the classical picture drastically. It gives rise to a strong flattening of the Coulomb oscillations for low resistances, but in the Coulomb blockade regime inelastic electron cotunneling persists. The temperature where these effects are important are accessible in experiments.