National Institute Of Materials Physics - Romania

The paper presents a few examples relevant for the application of radiofrequency plasmas for processing of materials and surfaces. The examples have been chosen in order to match the trends in plasma processing science, namely processing at atmospheric pressure, growth of nanostructured materials and design of filtration systems responsive to external stimuli.

We present a theoretical study of the electronic transport through a many-level quantum dot driven by time-dependent signals applied at the contacts to the leads. If the barriers oscillate out of phase, the system operates like a turnstile pump under a finite constant bias, as observed in the experiments of Kouwenhoven [Phys. Rev. Lett. 67, 1626 (1991)]. The time-dependent currents and their averages over successive pumping periods are computed from the Keldysh formalism for tight-binding models. The calculation considers a sudden application of the pumping potentials at t=0, which leads to transient features of the time-dependent and averaged currents during the first pumping cycles which turn out to be important in the high-frequency regime. We show that in the transient regime, the efficiency of the system as a pump is rather poor because it mainly absorbs charge from both leads in order to fill the levels located below the bias window. Under a finite bias and a low-frequency pumping signal, the charge transferred across the system depends on the number of levels located within the bias window. The internal charge dynamics and the role of energy sidebands are investigated. The so-called satellite peaks of the averaged current are also observed in the transient regime.

We apply the Keldysh formalism in order to derive a current formula easy to use for a system with many sites, one of which is interacting. The main technical challenge is to deal with the lesser Green's function. It turns out that, in the case of the left-right symmetry, the knowledge of the lesser Green's function is not necessary and an exact current formula can be expressed in terms of retarded Green's functions only. The application is done for a triangular interferometer which gives a good account of the Fano-Kondo effect. It is found that the interference effects, in the context of Kondo correlations, give rise to a point in the parameter space where the conductance is temperature independent. We include a comparison with the results from Ng's ansatz [Phys. Rev. Lett. 70, 3635 (1993)], which are less accurate, but can be used also in the absence of the above mentioned symmetry.

We investigate nonstationary electronic transport in noninteracting nanostructures driven by a finite bias and time-dependent signals applied at their contacts to the leads. The systems are modeled by a tight-binding Hamiltonian, and the transient currents are computed from the nonequilibrium Green-Keldysh formalism. The numerical implementation is not restricted to weak coupling to the leads and does not imply the wideband limit assumption for the spectral width of the leads. As an application of the method we study in detail the transient behavior and the charge dynamics in single and double quantum dots connected to leads by a steplike potential, but the method allows as well consideration of nonperiodic potentials or short pulses. We show that when the higher-energy levels of the isolated system are located within the bias window of the leads, the transient current approaches the steady state in a nonoscillatory smooth fashion. At moderate coupling to the leads and fixed bias the transient acquires a steplike structure, the length of the steps increasing with system size. The number of levels inside a finite bias window can be tuned by a constant gate potential. We find also that the transient behavior depends on the specific way of coupling the leads to the mesoscopic system.

A problem of electronic correlations is considered for two specific mesoscopic systems: the quantum point contact (QPC) and the double quantum dot (2QD) system. The systems are described using a generalized Anderson Hamiltonian. We show that charge fluctuations are relevant for electronic transport. In the QPC a local accumulation of charge and the dynamical Coulomb blockade effect lead to the 0.7 structure in the conductance characteristics. The evolution of the conductance with a magnetic field and in non-equilibrium situations is presented as well. The double quantum dot is studied in the approach, in which correlations within the 2QD are treated exactly, whereas the coupling of the 2QD to the leads is considered in the approximation valid at temperatures above the Kondo temperature. We analyse the evolution of the gate voltage dependence of the spin correlation functions and the conductance with the change of the interdot hopping. For the hopping parameter greater than a threshold value of the on-dot repulsion the physics of the device is dominated by the ground state eigenstates of the 2QD and antiferromagnetic correlations in the case of the doubly occupied 2QD. With a decrease of the interdot hopping repulsion below the threshold we observe a significant reduction of the antiferromagnetic coupling between the dots together with an enhanced occupation of the triplet states.

We show that, due to band mixing, the eigenstate localization within the disordered Landau bands gets an asymmetric structure: the degree of localization increases in the lower part of the band and decreases in the upper one. The calculation is performed for a two-dimensional lattice with the Anderson disorder potential and we prove that this effect is related to the upper shift of the extended states within the band and is enhanced by the disorder strength. The asymmetric localization and the energy shift disappear when the interband coupling is switched off.

We model a small quantum dot with a magnetic impurity by the Anderson Hamiltonian with a supplementary exchange interaction term. The transport calculations are performed by means of the Green functions within the equation of motion scheme, in which two decoupling procedures are proposed, for high and low temperatures, respectively. The paper focuses on the charge fluctuations for such a system, an aspect not addressed before, as well as on the Kondo resonance. We show a specific role of the excited state, which can be observed in transport and in spin-spin correlations. Our studies show a many-body feature of the phase shift of transmitted electrons, which is manifested in a specific dip. In the Kondo regime, our calculations complement existing theoretical results. The system shows three Kondo peaks in the density of states: one at the Fermi energy and two side peaks, at a distance corresponding to the singlet-triplet level spacing. The existence of the central peak is conditioned by a degenerate state (the triplet) below the Fermi energy.

We study the Fano effect and the visibility of the Aharonov-Bohm oscillations for a mesoscopic interferometer with an embedded quantum dot in the presence of a nearby second dot. When the electron-electron interaction between the two dots is considered the nearby dot acts as a charge detector. We compute the currents through the interferometer and detector within the Keldysh formalism and the self-energy of the nonequilibrium Green's functions is found up to the second order in the interaction strength. The current formula contains a correction to the Landauer-Buttiker formula. Its contribution to transport and dephasing is discussed. As the bias applied on the detector is increased, the amplitude of both the Fano resonance and Aharonov-Bohm oscillations are considerably reduced due to controlled dephasing. This result is explained by analyzing the behavior of the imaginary part of the interaction self-energy as a function of energy and bias. We emphasize as well the role of the ring-dot coupling. Our theoretical results are consistent with the experimental observation of Buks [Nature 391, 871 (1998)].

We consider the superfluid-insulator transition for cold bosons under an effective magnetic field. We investigate how the applied magnetic field affects the Mott transition within mean-field theory and find that the critical hopping strength (t/U)(c) increases with the applied field. The increase in the critical hopping follows the bandwidth of the Hofstadter butterfly at the given value of the magnetic field. We also calculate the magnetization and superfluid density within mean-field theory.

Motivated by the pionieering experiments of Buks et al. [Nature 391, 871 (1998)] we investigate the visibility of the Fano effect in a single-dot Aharonov-Bohm interferometer which is Coulomb-coupled to a nearby quantum dot. The latter acts as a 'Which Path Detector' and is coupled to two leads on which a finite bias is applied. Using the non-equilibrium Keldysh-Green function formalism we compute the currents through the detector and the interferometer. We take into account the first two contributions to the interaction self energy and emphasize the correction to the Landauer formula which appears beyond the single-particle approximation. Particular attention is given to the coherence properties of the interferometer in the presence of the electron-electron interaction between the embedded dot and the detector. We show that when the detector is subjected to a finite bias the amplitude of Aharonov-Bohm oscillations of the current through the interferometer decreases. The Fano line is in turn rather stable under interaction. Our results generalize an earlier work of Silva and Levit [Phys. Rev. B 63, 201309 (2001)] and complement the existing description of the controlled dephasing. (c) 2007 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.