Effects of coulomb repulsion on conductivity of heterojunction carbon nanotube quantum dots with spin-orbital coupling and interacting leads

Abstract We performed numerical studies for the conductance of a heterojunction carbon nanotube quantum dot (QD) with an extra spin orbital quantum number and a conventional QD in which the electron state is determined only by the spin quantum number. Our computational approach took into account the spin-orbit interaction and the Coulomb repulsion both between electrons on a QD as well as between the QD electron and the contacts. We utilized an approach based on the Keldysh non-equilibrium Green's function formalism as well as the equation of motion technique. We focused on the case of a finite Coulombic on-site repulsion and considered two possible cases of applied voltage: spin bias and conventional bias. For the system of interest we obtained bias spectroscopy diagrams, i.e. contour charts showing dependence of conductivity on two variables - voltage and the energy level position in a QD - which can be controlled by the plunger gate voltage. The finite Coulombic repulsion splits the density of states into two distinct maxima with the energy separation between them controlled by that parameter. It was also shown that an increase of either the value of the on-site Coulomb repulsion in a QD or the parameter of the Coulomb repulsion between the electrons in the QD and the contacts leads to an overall shift of the density of electronic states dependence toward higher energy values. Presence of the QD-lead interaction yields formation of a new pair of peaks in the differential conductance dependence. We also show that existence of four quantum states in a QD leads to abrupt changes in the density of states. These results could be beneficial for potential applications in nanotube-based amperometric sensors.