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

F. Xu, C. Holmqvist, G. Rastelli, and W. Belzig
Phys. Rev. B 94, 245111 – Published 5 December 2016

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 kBT much lower than the bias energy eV and the plasmon energy ω0, a condition which is fortunately realized experimentally.

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  • Received 9 September 2016
  • Revised 4 November 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.94.245111

©2016 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

F. Xu1, C. Holmqvist2, G. Rastelli1, and W. Belzig1,*

  • 1Fachbereich Physik, Universität Konstanz, D-78457 Konstanz, Germany
  • 2Department of Physics and Electrical Engineering, Linnaeus University, 39182 Kalmar, Sweden

  • *Wolfgang.Belzig@uni.kn

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Vol. 94, Iss. 24 — 15 December 2016

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