Reappearance of the Kondo effect in serially coupled symmetric triple quantum dots

¹ Department of Physics, Renmin University of China - Beijing 100872, China
² Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, University of Science and Technology of China Hefei, Anhui 230026, China
³ Department of Chemistry, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology - Kowloon, Hong Kong

^(a) wjh@ruc.edu.cn

Received: 22 September 2015
Accepted: 25 November 2015

Abstract

We investigate the spectral properties of a serially coupled triple quantum dot (STQD) system by means of the hierarchical equations of motion (HEOM) approach. We find that with the increase of the interdot coupling t, the first Kondo screening is followed by another Kondo effect reappearing due to the transition from the respective Kondo singlet state of individual QD to the coherence bonding state generated among the three QDs. The reappearance of the Kondo effect results in the three-peak structure of the spectral functions of peripheral QD-1(3). By investigating the susceptibility χ, we find that the local susceptibility of intermediate QD-2 is a positive value at weak interdot coupling, while it changes into a negative value at strong interdot coupling, at which the STQD system gives rise to the reappearance of the Kondo effect. We also find that the slopes of will deviate from a straight line behaviour at low temperature in the reappearing Kondo regime. In addition, the influence of temperature and dot-lead coupling strength on the reappearing Kondo effect as well as the Kondo-correlated transport properties are afterwards exploited in detail.