Spin-valley blockade in carbon nanotube double quantum dots

We present a theoretical study of the Pauli or spin-valley blockade for double quantum dots in semiconducting carbon nanotubes. In our model, we take into account the following characteristic features of carbon nanotubes: i fourfold spin and valley degeneracy of the quantum-dot levels, ii the intrinsic spin-orbit interaction which is enhanced by the tube curvature, and iii valley mixing due to short-range disorder, i.e., substitutional atoms, adatoms, etc. We find that the spin-valley blockade can be lifted in the presence of short-range disorder, which induces two independent random in magnitude and direction valley-Zeeman fields in the two dots, and hence acts similarly to hyperfine interaction in conventional semiconductor quantum dots. In the case of strong spin-orbit interaction, we identify a parameter regime where the current as the function of an applied axial magnetic field shows a zero-field dip with a width controlled by the interdot tunneling amplitude, in agreement with recent experiments.