Shot noise of inelastic tunneling through quantum dot systems

Abstract

We present a theoretical analysis of the effect of inelastic electron scattering on current and its fluctuations in a mesoscopic quantum dot (QD) connected to two leads, based on a recently developed nonperturbative technique involving the approximate mapping of the many-body electron-phonon coupling problem onto a multichannel single-electron scattering problem. In this, we apply the Büttiker scattering theory of shot noise for a two-terminal mesoscopic device to the multichannel case with differing weight factors and examine zero-frequency shot noise for two special cases: (i) a single-molecule QD and (ii) coupled semiconductor QDs. The nonequilibrium Green's function method facilitates calculation of single-electron transmission and reflection amplitudes for inelastic processes under nonequilibrium conditions in the mapping model. For the single-molecule QD we find that, in the presence of the electron-phonon interaction, both differential conductance and differential shot noise display additional peaks as bias-voltage increases due to phonon-assisted processes. In the case of coupled QDs, our nonperturbative calculations account for the electron-phonon interaction on an equal footing with couplings to the leads, as well as the coupling between the two dots. Our results exhibit oscillations in both the current and shot noise as functions of the energy difference between the two QDs, resulting from the spontaneous emission of phonons in the nonlinear transport process. In the "zero-phonon" resonant tunneling regime, the shot noise exhibits a double peak, while in the "one-phonon" region, only a single peak appears.