Nanoscale quantum dots: beyond the mean-field approximation
Evgenii Narimanov*
Electrical Engineering Department, Princeton University,
Princeton, NJ 08540 USA
This is an abstract
for a presentation given at the
Ninth
Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology.
There will be a link from here to the full article when it is
available on the web.
Quantum Dots - artificial atoms constructed from semiconductors are expected to provide the basis for the future electronics. These artifical atoms represent the foundation of some of the most promising nanotechnologies - the single-electron transistor, where the charge of the quantum dot produces the non-linearity, and the spintronics - the control of charge transport through manipulation of the spins of the electrons in the dot.
Due to the extreme electron confinement in the nano-scale quantum dots, and the strong fluctuations of the electron density in a dot with only a few electrons, the simple mean-field description of the electron-electron interactions, brakes down.
Charge density fluctuations also lead to the violation of the Hund's rule and dramatically change the spin states occupation in the nano-scale quantum dots. Understanding of these fundamental effects and the development of the methods of their quantitative description is therefore critrical to the successful development of the future nanotechnologies.
We develop the theory of low-lying eigenstates in nanoscale quantum dots, taking into account the charge density fluctuations and the dot anisotropy characteristic to the nanodevices based on silicon technology. We demonstrate that the interaction effects lead to anomalous peak doublets in the Coulom blocade transport in these systems, in agreement with recent experiments.
*Corresponding Address:
Evgenii Narimanov
Electrical Engineering Department, Princeton University
E-QUAD, Princeton, NJ 08540 USA
Phone: (609)258-6997
Fax: (609)258-2158
Email: [email protected]
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