THEORY OF MANY ELECTRON TRANSPORT IN QUANTUM WAVEGUIDE DEVICES
THEORY OF MANY ELECTRON TRANSPORT IN QUANTUM WAVEGUIDE DEVICES
J R Barker and J Cluckie
Arrays of coupled ultra-small capacitor structures exhibit significant charging effects due to the large charging energies deriving from the small values of the components of the capacitance matrix. In particular, the occurrence of single-electronic effects such as the Coulomb blockade, correlated single electron tunnelling, and the demonstration of switchable single flows, has raised hopes of a future single-electronics technology. The orthodox model of correlated single-electron tunnelling has been highly successful for the relatively large metal-insulator systems; it assumes continuous energy distributions, large numbers of states in the ˆØmetallicˆç electrodes and simplified pictures of tunnelling and electron correlation. However, many tenets of the orthodox theory are lost in the 2DEG semiconductor systems and in the recently proposed coupled Schottky dot structures. Rather than a single electron picture we must deal with a few-body problem in which only distant dense ˆØelectrodesˆç might be treated by self-consistent mean field approaches.In the present project we are analysing the general problem of the transport of n-interacting electrons within an arbitrary shaped quantum waveguide (hence discrete energy states), including charging effects, using an extension of the 1-electron coupled-mode theory developed previously. The previous studies have been applied to transport through quantum point contacts in the presence of realistic fluctuation and confinement potentials. The present approach begins the task of incorporating many-body effects including correlated tunnelling and many-body tunnelling which are expected in dense ultra-small devices.
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