ELECTRONIC CORRELATIONS AND THE NONLINEAR CONDUCTANCE OF QUANTUM DOTS

We present calculations of the tunneling characteristics of quantum dot systems with few electrons, matting explicit consideration of electronic correlations introduced by Coulomb interactions. These are shown to strongly affect the many-particle overlap matrix elements which describe the addition or removal of single electrons to the system. We show that the main features of the differential conductance of quantum dots observed in recent experiments in the nonlinear regime can be attributed to effects introduced by these electronic correlations.