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arXiv:0911.5496 · Europhysics Letters (EPL)

Non-equilibrium current and relaxation dynamics of a charge-fluctuating quantum dot

Christoph Karrasch, Sabine Andergassen, Mikhail Pletyukhov, Dirk Schuricht, L. Borda, V. Meden, Herbert Schoeller

Published May 1, 2010• 74 citations
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Abstract

We study the steady-state current in a minimal model for a quantum dot dominated by charge fluctuations and analytically describe the time evolution into this state. The current is driven by a finite-bias voltage V across the dot, and two different renormalization group methods are used to treat small-to-intermediate local Coulomb interactions. The corresponding flow equations can be solved analytically, which allows to identify all microscopic cutoff scales. Exploring the entire parameter space we find rich non-equilibrium physics which cannot be understood by simply considering the bias voltage as an infrared cutoff. For the experimentally relevant case of left-right asymmetric couplings, the current generically shows a power law suppression for large V . The relaxation dynamics towards the steady state features characteristic oscillations as well as an interplay of exponential and power law decay.

DOI
10.1209/0295-5075/90/30003

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We study the steady-state current in a minimal model for a quantum dot dominated by charge fluctuations and analytically describe the time evolution into this state. The current is driven by a finite-bias voltage V across the dot, and two different renormalization group methods are used to treat small-to-intermediate local Coulomb interactions. The corresponding flow equations can be solved analytically, which allows to identify all microscopic cutoff scales. Exploring the entire parameter space we find rich non-equilibrium physics which cannot be understood by simply considering the bias voltage as an infrared cutoff. For the experimentally relevant case of left-right asymmetric couplings, the current generically shows a power law suppression for large V . The relaxation dynamics towards the steady state features characteristic oscillations as well as an interplay of exponential and power law decay.
Using a real-time renormalization group method we study the minimal model of a quantum dot dominated by charge fluctuations, the two-lead interacting resonant level model, at finite bias voltage. We develop a set of RG equations to treat the case of weak and strong charge fluctuations, together with the determination of power-law exponents up to second order in the Coulomb interaction. We derive analytic expressions for the charge susceptibility, the steady-state current, and the conductance in the situation of arbitrary system parameters, in particular away from the particle-hole symmetric point and for asymmetric Coulomb interactions. In the asymmetric situation we find that power laws can be observed for the current only as a function of the level position (gate voltage) but in general not as a function of the voltage except for extremely large voltages. Furthermore, we study the quench dynamics after sudden switch-on of the level-lead couplings. The time evolution of the dot occupation and current is governed by exponential relaxation accompanied by voltage-dependent oscillations and characteristic algebraic decay.
We study quantum many-body effects on the real-time evolution of the current through quantum dots. By using a non-equilibrium renormalization group approach, we provide analytic results for the relaxation dynamics into the stationary state and identify the microscopic cutoff scales that determine the transport rates. We find rich non-equilibrium physics induced by the interplay of the different energy scales. While the short-time limit is governed by universal dynamics, the long-time behavior features characteristic oscillations as well as an interplay of exponential and power-law decay.
We investigate bias-driven non-equilibrium quantum phase transitions in a paradigmatic quantum-transport setup: an interacting quantum dot coupled to non-interacting metallic leads. Using the Random Phase Approximation, which is exact in the limit of a large number of dot levels, we map out the zero-temperature non-equilibrium phase diagram as a function of interaction strength and applied bias. We focus our analysis on the behavior of the charge susceptibility and the current noise in the vicinity of the transition. Remarkably, despite the intrinsically non-equilibrium nature of the steady state, critical charge fluctuations admit an effective-temperature description, Teff(T,V)T_{\text{eff}}(T,V)Teff​(T,V), that collapses the steady-state behavior onto its equilibrium form. In sharp contrast, current fluctuations exhibit genuinely non-equilibrium features: the fluctuation-dissipation ratio becomes negative in the ordered phase, corresponding to a negative effective temperature for the current degrees of freedom. These results establish current noise as a sensitive probe of critical fluctuations at non-equilibrium quantum phase transitions and open new directions for exploring voltage-driven critical phenomena in quantum transport systems.
We study the relaxation dynamics of a quantum dot with local Coulomb correlations coupled to two noninteracting leads which are held in grand-canonical equilibrium. Only charge degrees of freedom are considered and the dot is described by a model which in the scaling limit becomes equivalent to the interacting resonant level model. We examine the time evolution of the current and the dot occupancy resulting from changes in the dot-lead coupling, the dots' on-site energy, or the charging energy. Abrupt and smooth parameter changes as well as setups with and without driving bias voltage are considered. For biased dots, we investigate the often studied response after turning on the dot-lead coupling but also the experimentally more relevant case in which the voltage is turned on. We identify and explain a variety of interesting many-body effects, and we clarify the role of initial correlations.
We introduce a real time version of the functional renormalization group, which allows us to study correlation effects on nonequilibrium transport through quantum dots. Our method is equally capable to address (i) the relaxation out of a nonequilibrium initial state into a (potentially) steady state driven by a bias voltage and (ii) the dynamics governed by an explicitly time-dependent Hamiltonian. All time regimes from transient to asymptotic can be tackled; the only approximation is the consistent truncation of the flow equations at a given order. As an application we investigate the relaxation dynamics of the interacting resonant level model, which describes a fermionic quantum dot dominated by charge fluctuations. Moreover, we study incoherence and relaxation phenomena within the ohmic spin-boson model by mapping the latter to the interacting resonant level model.
We study the time evolution and steady state of the charge current in a single-impurity Anderson model, using matrix product states techniques. A nonequilibrium situation is imposed by applying a bias voltage across one-dimensional tight-binding leads. Focusing on particle-hole symmetry, we extract current-voltage characteristics from universal low-bias up to high-bias regimes, where band effects start to play a dominant role. We discuss three quenches, which after strongly quench-dependent transients yield the same steady-state current. Among these quenches we identify those favorable for extracting steady-state observables. The period of short-time oscillations is shown to compare well to real-time renormalization group results for a simpler model of spinless fermions. We find indications that many-body effects play an important role at high-bias voltage and finite bandwidth of the metallic leads. The growth of entanglement entropy after a certain time scale $\ensuremath{\propto}{\ensuremath{\Delta}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ is the major limiting factor for calculating the time evolution. We show that the magnitude of the steady-state current positively correlates with entanglement entropy. The role of high-energy states for the steady-state current is explored by considering a damping term in the time evolution.