Non-Cayley-tree model for quasiparticle decay in a quantum dot

Abstract

The decay of a quasiparticle in a confined geometry, resulting from electron-electron interactions, has been mapped onto the single-electron problem of diffusion on a Cayley tree by Altshuler et al. [Phys.Rev.Lett. 78, 2803 (1997)]. We study an alternative model, that captures the strong correlations between the self-energies of different excitations with the same number of quasiparticles. The model has a recursion relation for the single-particle density of states that is markedly different from the Cayley tree. It remains tractable enough that sufficiently large systems can be studied to observe the localization transition in Fock space predicted by Altshuler et al.