Large spin-orbit effects in small interacting quantum dots

Ganpathy Murthy, R. Shankar

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

We consider small ballistic quantum dots weakly coupled to leads in the chaotic regime and look for significant spin-orbit effects. We find that these effects can become quite prominent in the vicinity of degeneracies of many-body energies. We illustrate the idea by considering a case where the intrinsic exchange term -J S2 brings singlet and triplet many-body states near each other, while an externally tunable Zeeman term then closes the gap between the singlet and one of the triplet states (with spin projection parallel to the external field). Near this degeneracy, the spin-orbit coupling leads to a striking temperature dependence of the conductance, with observable effects of order unity at temperatures lower than the strength of the spin-orbit coupling. Under favorable circumstances, spelled out in the paper, these order-unity effects in the conductance persist to temperatures much higher than the spin-orbit coupling strength. Our conclusions are unaffected by the presence of nonuniversal perturbations. We suggest a class of experiments to explore this regime.

Original languageEnglish
Article number075327
JournalPhysical Review B - Condensed Matter and Materials Physics
Volume75
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 22 2007

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
  • Condensed Matter Physics

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