Coulomb Blockade of Tunneling Through a Double Quantum Dot

TL;DR

This paper investigates how inter-dot tunneling influences Coulomb blockade in double quantum dots, revealing a crossover from temperature-independent conductance to power-law suppression due to many-body effects.

Contribution

It provides an analytical description of Coulomb blockade peak shapes and predicts a crossover in conductance behavior driven by inter-dot tunneling.

Findings

Crossover from temperature-independent to power-law conductance suppression

Analytical peak shape formulas derived

Suppression linked to Anderson orthogonality catastrophe

Abstract

We study the Coulomb blockade of tunneling through a double quantum dot. The temperature dependence of the linear conductance is strongly affected by the inter-dot tunneling. As the tunneling grows, a crossover from temperature-independent peak conductance to a power-law suppression of conductance at low temperatures is predicted. This suppression is a manifestation of the Anderson orthogonality catastrophe associated with the charge re-distribution between the dots, which accompanies the tunneling of an electron into a dot. We find analytically the shapes of the Coulomb blockade peaks in conductance as a function of gate voltage.