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Updated: Aug 9, 2026

Scanning-probe Single-electron Capacitance Spectroscopy
Published on: July 30, 2013
Smearing of the coulomb blockade by resonant tunneling
1Department of Physics, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708-0305, USA.
Abstract:
We study the Coulomb blockade in a grain coupled to a lead via a resonant impurity level. We show that the strong energy dependence of the transmission coefficient through the impurity level can have a dramatic effect on the quantization of the grain charge. In particular, if the resonance is sufficiently narrow, the Coulomb staircase shows very sharp steps even if the transmission through the impurity at the Fermi energy is perfect. This is in contrast to the naive expectation that perfect transmission should completely smear charging effects.
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