Smearing of charge fluctuations in a grain by spin-flip assisted tunneling

Karyn Le Hur, Pascal Simon

Published 2002-10-16, updated 2003-04-03Version 2

We investigate the charge fluctuations of a grain (large dot) coupled to a lead via a small quantum dot in the Kondo regime. We show that the strong entanglement of charge and spin flips in this setup can result in a stable SU(4) Kondo fixed point, which considerably smears out the Coulomb staircase behavior already in the weak tunneling limit. This behavior is robust enough to be experimentally observable.