Tunneling transport and diffusion in weakly coupled quantum dot ensembles

Abstract

The lateral tunneling rate and carrier diffusion in weakly coupled quantum dots are analyzed. In the weak coupling limit, localization of charge within a single dot is obtained through superposition of the lowest-energy eigenstates of coupled dots. The free evolution of the wave function leads to tunneling, but with a time dependence that includes dephasing. Idealized quantum dot boundary conditions are used to estimate tunneling times, and these are compared with recent experiments. © 1998 American Institute of Physics.