Transmission through an interacting quantum dot in the Coulomb blockade regime

¹ The Jack and Pearl Resnick Institute of Advanced Technology, Department of Physics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel
² Solid State Institute and Physics Department, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

Received: 25 November 1997
Accepted: 30 January 1998

Abstract

The influence of electron-electron (e-e) interactions on the transmission through a quantum dot is investigated numerically for the Coulomb blockade regime. For vanishing magnetic fields, the conductance peak height statistics is found to be independent of the interactions strength. It is identical to the statistics predicted by constant-interaction single-electron random matrix theory and agrees well with recent experiments. However, in contrast to these random matrix theories, our calculations reproduce the reduced sensitivity to magnetic flux observed in many experiments. The relevant physics is traced to the short-range Coulomb correlations providing thus a unified explanation for the transmission statistics as well as for the large conductance peak spacing fluctuations observed in other experiments.