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Phys. Rev. B 72, 045305 (2005) [14 pages]

Statistics of wave functions in disordered systems with applications to Coulomb blockade peak spacing

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Mike Miller, Denis Ullmo*, and Harold U. Baranger
Department of Physics, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708-0305, USA

Received 21 June 2004; revised 2 March 2005; published 5 July 2005

Despite considerable work on the energy-level and wave function statistics of disordered quantum systems, numerical studies of those statistics relevant for electron-electron interactions in mesoscopic systems have been lacking. We plug this gap by using a tight-binding model to study a wide variety of statistics for the two-dimensional, disordered quantum system in the diffusive regime. Our results are in good agreement with random matrix theory (or its extensions) for simple statistics such as the probability distribution of energy levels or spatial correlation of a wave function. However, we see substantial disagreement in several statistics which involve both integrating over space and different energy levels, indicating that disordered systems are more complex than previously thought. These are exactly the quantities relevant to electron-electron interaction effects in quantum dots; in fact, we apply these results to the Coulomb blockade, where we find altered spacings between conductance peaks and wider spin distributions than traditionally expected.

© 2005 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.72.045305
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevB.72.045305
PACS:
73.21.−b, 72.15.Rn, 73.23.Hk, 05.45.Mt

*Permanent address: Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modèles Statistiques (LPTMS), 91405 Orsay Cedex, France.