Towards an Explanation of the Mesoscopic Double-Slit Experiment: A New Model for Charging of a Quantum Dot

For a quantum dot (QD) in the intermediate regime between integrable and fully chaotic, the widths of single-particle levels naturally differ by orders of magnitude. In particular, the width of one strongly coupled level may be larger than the spacing between other, very narrow, levels. In this case many consecutive Coulomb blockade peaks are due to occupation of the same broad level. Between the peaks the electron jumps from this level to one of the narrow levels, and the transmission through the dot at the next resonance essentially repeats that at the previous one. This offers a natural explanation to the recently observed behavior of the transmission phase in an interferometer with a QD.