RPA approach to non-linear transport in quantum dots

Abstract

An accurate theoretical treatment of electron-electron interactions in mesoscopic systems is available in very few cases and approximation schemes are developed in most of the applications, especially for many-level quantum dots. Here we present transport calculations within the random-phase approximation for the Coulomb interaction using the Keldysh Green's functions formalism. We describe the quantum dot systems by a tight-binding Hamiltonian. Our method is similar to the one used by Faleev and Stockman [Phys. Rev. B 66 085318 (2002)] in their study of the equilibrium properties of a homogeneous 2D electron gas. The important extension at the formal level is that we combine the RPA and the Keldysh formalism for studying non-linear transport properties of open quantum dots. Within the Keldysh formalism the polarization operator becomes a contour-ordered quantity that should be computed either from the non-interacting Green functions of the coupled quantum dot (the so-called G0W approximation) either self-consistently (GW approximation). We performed both non-selfconsistent and self-consistent calculations and compare the results. In particular we recover the Coulomb diamonds for interacting quantum dots and we discuss the charge sensing effects in parallel quantum dots.