Decoherence and relaxation in the interacting quantum dot system

Department of Physics, University of Science and Technology of China - Hefei, Anhui, 230026, China

Corresponding author: weng@ustc.edu.cn

Received: 20 October 2008
Accepted: 24 November 2008

Abstract

In this paper we study the low-temperature kinetics of the electrons in the system composed of a quantum dot connected to two leads by solving the equation of motion. The decoherence and the relaxation of the system caused by the gate voltage noise and electron-phonon scattering are investigated. In order to take account of the strong correlation of the electrons in this system, the quasi-exact wave functions are calculated using an improved matrix product states algorithm. This algorithm enables us to calculate the wave functions of the ground state and the low-lying excited states with satisfied accuracy and thus enables us to study the kinetics of the system more effectively. It is found that although both of these two mechanisms are proportional to the electron number operator in the dot, the kinetics are quite different. The noise-induced decoherence is much more effective than the energy relaxation, while the energy relaxation and decoherence time are of the same order for the electron-phonon scattering. Moreover, the noise-induced decoherence increases with the lowering of the dot level, but the relaxation and decoherence due to the electron-phonon scattering decrease.