Illumination of atoms by resonant lasers can pump electrons into a coherent superposition of hyperfine levels which can no longer absorb the light. Such superposition is known as a dark state, because fluorescent light emission is then suppressed. Here we report an all-electric analogue of this destructive interference effect in a carbon nanotube quantum dot. The dark states are a coherent superposition of valley (angular momentum) states which are decoupled from either the drain or the source leads. Their emergence is visible in asymmetric current−voltage characteristics, with missing current steps and current suppression which depend on the polarity of the applied source-drain bias. Our results demonstrate coherent-population trapping by all-electric means in an artificial atom.

The Fano factor stability diagram of a C 3v symmetric triangular quantum dot is analyzed for increasing electron fillings N . At low filling, conventional Poissonian and sub-Poissonian behavior is found. At larger filling, N 2, a breaking of the electron-hole symmetry is manifested in super-Poissonian noise with a peculiar bias voltage dependence of the Fano factor at Coulomb and interference blockade. An analysis of the Fano map unravels a nontrivial electron-bunching mechanism arising from the presence of degenerate many-body states combined with orbital interference and Coulomb interactions. An expression for the associated dark states is provided for generic N .

We propose a transport blockade mechanism in quantum dot arrays and conducting molecules based on an interplay of Coulomb repulsion and the formation of edge states. As a model we employ a dimer chain that exhibits a topological phase transition. The connection to a strongly biased electron source and drain enables transport. We show that the related emergence of edge states is manifest in the shot noise properties as it is accompanied by a crossover from bunched electron transport to a Poissonian process. For both regions we develop a scenario that can be captured by a rate equation. The resulting analytical expressions for the Fano factor agree well with the numerical solution of a full quantum master equation.

We develop a scheme for the computation of the full-counting statistics of transport described by Markovian master equations with an arbitrary time dependence. It is based on a hierarchy of generalized density operators, where the trace of each operator yields one cumulant. This direct relation offers a better numerical efficiency than the equivalent number-resolved master equation. The proposed method is particularly useful for conductors with an elaborate time dependence stemming, e.g., from pulses or combinations of slow and fast parameter switching. As a test bench for the evaluation of the numerical stability, we consider time-independent problems for which the full-counting statistics can be computed by other means. As applications, we study cumulants of higher order for two time-dependent transport problems of recent interest, namely steady-state coherent transfer by adiabatic passage (CTAP) and Landau-Zener-Stückelberg-Majorana (LZSM) interference in an open double quantum dot.

Many-body entanglement is at the heart of the Kondo effect, which has its hallmark in quantum dots as a zero-bias conductance peak at low temperatures. It signals the emergence of a conducting singlet state formed by a localized dot degree of freedom and conduction electrons. Carbon nanotubes offer the possibility to study the emergence of the Kondo entanglement by tuning many-body correlations with a gate voltage. Here we show another side of Kondo correlations, which counterintuitively tend to block conduction channels: inelastic co-tunnelling lines in the magnetospectrum of a carbon nanotube strikingly disappear when tuning the gate voltage. Considering the global SU(2) ⊗ SU(2) symmetry of a nanotube coupled to leads, we find that only resonances involving flips of the Kramers pseudospins, associated to this symmetry, are observed at temperatures and voltages below the corresponding Kondo scale. Our results demonstrate the robust formation of entangled many-body states with no net pseudospin.