Dynamical Coulomb blockade theory of plasmon-mediated light emission from a tunnel junction

Year: 2016

Authors: Xu F., Holmqvist C., Rastelli G., Belzig W.

Autors Affiliation: Univ Konstanz, Fachbereich Phys, D-78457 Constance, Germany. Linnaeus Univ, Dept Phys & Elect Engn, S-39182 Kalmar, Sweden.

Abstract: Inelastic tunneling of electrons can generate the emission of photons with energies intuitively limited by the applied bias voltage. However, experiments indicate that more complex processes involving the interaction of electrons with plasmon polaritons lead to photon emission with overbias energies. We recently proposed a model of this observation in Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 066801 (2014), in analogy to the dynamical Coulomb blockade, originally developed for treating the electromagnetic environment in mesoscopic circuits. This model describes the correlated tunneling of two electrons interacting with a local plasmon-polariton mode, represented by a resonant circuit, and shows that the overbias emission is due to the non-Gaussian fluctuations. Here we extend our model to study the overbias emission at finite temperature. We find that the thermal smearing strongly masks the overbias emission. Hence, the detection of the correlated tunneling processes requires temperatures k(B)T much lower than the bias energy eV and the plasmon energy h omega(0), a condition which is fortunately realized experimentally.

Journal/Review: PHYSICAL REVIEW B

Volume: 94 (24)      Pages from: 245111  to: 245111

More Information: This work was supported by the DFG through SFB 767, the Center of Applied Photonics (CAP), the Kurt Lion Foundation, and the Zukunftskolleg of the University of Konstanz.
KeyWords: Dynamical Coulomb blockade, quantum light emitter, quantum point contact
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.94.245111