Coulomb Blockade of a Three-terminal Quantum Dot

Robert Andrzej Zak, Karsten Flensberg

Published 2007-11-12Version 1

We study an interacting single-level quantum dot weakly coupled to three electrodes. When two electrodes are biased by voltages with opposite polarities, while keeping the third lead (the stem) grounded, the current through the stem is a measure of electron-hole asymmetry of the dot. In this setup we calculate the stem current for both metallic and ferromagnetic (collinearly polarized) leads and discuss how the three-terminal device gives additional information compared to the usual two-terminal setup. We calculate both the sequential and cotunneling contribution for the currents. For the latter part we include a regularization procedure for the cotunneling current, which enables us to also describe the behavior at the charge degeneracy points.