The influence of Coulomb interaction on transport through mesoscopic two-barrier structures

We investigate the influence of the Coulomb interaction on the energy spectrum of a finite number of electrons in a geometrically confined quantum mechanical system. The spectrum is calculated numerically using the Slater determinants of the one-electron states as basis set. It is found to be dominated by the Coulomb repulsion when the system is large. Coulomb and exchange matrix elements for a given combination of four one-electron states are of the same order of magnitude. As a consequence, the energy difference between the ground states of the (N+1)- and theN-electron system is an order of magnitude smaller than each of the matrix elements, although being much larger than the separation of the one-electron energy levels. We discuss the importance of the interaction effects for the explanation of the recently observed resonant behavior of the electronic transport through quantum dots.