Orbital caloritronic transport in strongly interacting quantum dots

Abstract

We discuss out-of-equilibrium population imbalances between different orbital states due to applied thermal gradients. This purely thermoelectric orbital effect appears quite generically in nanostructures with a pseudospin degree of freedom. We establish an orbital Seebeck coefficient that characterizes the induced orbital bias in response to a temperature difference between reservoirs coupled to a quantum conductor. We analyze a two-terminal strongly interacting quantum dot with two orbital states and find that the orbital thermopower acts as an excellent tool to describe the transition between SU(4) and SU(2) Kondo physics. Our conclusions are reinforced from a detailed comparison with the charge thermopower using numerical renormalization group calculations.