Coulomb drag in quantum circuits

ORAL

Abstract

We study drag effect in a system of two electrically isolated quantum point contacts (QPC), coupled by Coulomb interactions. Drag current exhibits maxima as a function of QPC gate voltages when the latter are tuned to the transitions between quantized conductance plateaus. In the linear regime this behavior is due to enhanced electron-hole asymmetry near an opening of a new conductance channel. In the nonlinear regime the drag current is proportional to the shot noise of the driving circuit, suggesting that the Coulomb drag experiments may be a convenient way to measure the quantum shot noise. Remarkably, the transition to the nonlinear regime may occur at driving voltages substantially smaller than the temperature.

*Research at ANL was supported by the US DOE under Contract No.DE-AC02-06CH11357. Research at UMN was supported by NSF grants DMR-0405212 and DMR-0804266.

Authors

  • Alex Levchenko

    • Argonne National Laboratory
  • Alex Kamenev

    • University of Minnesota