Signatures of electron correlations in the transport properties of quantum dots

TL;DR

This paper investigates how electron correlations influence transport properties in quantum dots by calculating transition matrix elements and analyzing their effects on conductance peaks and spectroscopy features.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical approach to compute transition matrix elements between correlated states and links these to experimental transport observations in quantum dots.

Findings

Variations in conductance peak heights explained by matrix elements.

Features in non-linear transport spectroscopy assigned to specific transitions.

Provides insights into the correlated electron states in quantum dots.

Abstract

The transition matrix elements between the correlated $N$ and $N\!+\!1$ electron states of a quantum dot are calculated by numerical diagonalization. They are the central ingredient for the linear and non--linear transport properties which we compute using a rate equation. The experimentally observed variations in the heights of the linear conductance peaks can be explained. The knowledge of the matrix elements as well as the stationary populations of the states allows to assign the features observed in the non--linear transport spectroscopy to certain transition and contains valuable information about the correlated electron states.