The role of the discontinuity of the exchange-correlation potential of density functional theory is studied in the context of electron transport and shown to be intimately related to Coulomb blockade. By following the time evolution of an interacting nanojunction attached to biased leads, we find that, instead of evolving to a steady state, the system reaches a dynamical state characterized by ...

Signatures of “mesoscopic Coulomb blockade” are reported for quantum dots with one fully transmitting point-contact lead; T1 ­ 1, T2 ø 1. Unlike the Coulomb blockade (CB) in weaktunneling devices sT1, T2 ø 1d, one-channel CB is a mesoscopic effect requiring quantum coherence. Several distinctive features of mesoscopic CB are observed, including a reduction in CB upon breaking time-reversal symm...

We report measurements of spin transitions for GaAs quantum dots in the Coulomb blockade regime and compare ground and excited state transport spectroscopy to direct measurements of the spin polarization of emitted current. Transport spectroscopy reveals both spin-increasing and spin-decreasing transitions, as well as higher-spin ground states, and allows g factors to be measured down to a sing...

We study the Coulomb blockade of tunneling through a double quantum dot. The temperature dependence of the linear conductance is strongly affected by the interdot tunneling. As the tunneling grows, a crossover from temperature-independent peak conductance to a power-law suppression of conductance at low temperatures is predicted. This suppression is a manifestation of the Anderson orthogonality...

Emergent behaviour from electron-transport properties is routinely observed in systems with dimensions approaching the nanoscale. However, analogous mesoscopic behaviour resulting from ionic transport has so far not been observed, most probably because of bottlenecks in the controlled fabrication of subnanometre nanopores for use in nanofluidics. Here, we report measurements of ionic transport ...

We have investigated one and two dimensional (1D and 2D) arrays of tunnel junctions in partial Coulomb blockade regime. The absolute accuracy of the Coulomb blockade thermometer is influenced by the external impedance of the array, which is not the same in the different topologies of 1D and 2D arrays. We demonstrate, both by experiment and by theoretical calculations in simple geometries, that ...

We investigate electron tunneling through atomically thin layers of hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). Metal (Cr/Au) and semimetal (graphite) counter-electrodes are employed. While the direct tunneling resistance increases nearly exponentially with barrier thickness as expected, the thicker junctions also exhibit clear signatures of Coulomb blockade, including strong suppression of the tunnel curre...

We study Coulomb blockade effects in the thermodynamic quantities of a weakly disordered metallic grain coupled to a metallic lead by a tunneling contact with a large conductance gT . We consider the case of broken time-reversal symmetry and obtain expressions for both the ensemble averaged amplitude of the Coulomb blockade oscillations of the thermodynamic potential and the correlator of its m...

We study transport in ferromagnetic single-electron transistors. The non-equilibrium spin accumulation on the island caused by a finite current through the system is described by a generalized theory of the Coulomb blockade. It enhances the tunnel magnetoresistance and has a drastic effect on the time-dependent transport properties. A transient decay of the spin accumulation may reverse the ele...

We present a theory of the Coulomb blockade for a tunnel junction, with arbitrarily large tunnel conductance but with small channel transmissions, placed in a general electromagnetic environment containing no island. Our model, based on a self-consistent calculation of the complex admittance of the junction, predicts that high tunnel conductances wash out the Coulomb blockade and restore Ohmic ...