Signatures of chaos in the statistical distribution of conductance peaks in quantum dots

Analytical expressions for the width and conductance peak distributions of irregularly shaped quantum dots in the Coulomb blockade regime are presented in the limits of conserved and broken time-reversal symmetry. The results are obtained using random matrix theory and are valid in general for any number of nonequivalent and correlated channels, assuming that the underlying classical dynamics of the electrons in the dot is chaotic or that the dot is weakly disordered. The results are expressed in terms of the channel correlation matrix, which for chaotic systems is given in closed form for both pointlike contacts and extended leads. We study the dependence of the distributions on the number of channels and their correlations. The theoretical distributions are in good agreement with those computed in a dynamical model of a chaotic billiard.