Transport of Interacting Electrons through a Pair of Coupled Metallic Quantum Dots

Recently it was demonstrated1 that important information about the effect of electron-electron interactions on quantum transport in disordered conductors can be obtained within a transparent theoretical framework of quasiclassical Langevin equations generalized to situations in which relaxation of the electron distribution function occurs at much longer time scales as compared to the electron dwell time between two neighboring scatterers. The main goal of this paper is to employ the approach 1 in order to study interaction effects in low temperature electron transport through the system of three quantum scatterers or, equivalently, two coupled quantum dots. This structure can serve as a model for a number of transport experiments. In addition to that, the system of three scatterers appears to be the simplest one in which the interaction correction to the I − V curve is described by two different contributions, one of them being absent in a yet simpler system of two quantum scatterers 2.