The time-dependent transport through single-molecule magnets coupled to magnetic or non-magnetic electrodes is studied in the framework of the generalized master equation method. We investigate the transient regime induced by the periodic switching o
f the source and drain contacts. If the electrodes have opposite magnetizations the quantum turnstile operation allows the stepwise writing of intermediate excited states. In turn, the transient currents provide a way to read these states. Within our approach we take into account both the uniaxial and transverse anisotropy. The latter may induce additional quantum tunneling processes which affect the efficiency of the proposed read-and-write scheme. An equally weighted mixture of molecular spin states can be prepared if one of the electrodes is ferromagnetic.
We study the effects of intraband relaxation processes on optical manipulation protocols for sp biexcitons hosted by CdTe disk-shaped quantum dots. The many-body states are calculated within the configuration interaction method starting from single-p
article states given by the kp theory. The time-dependent occupations of relevant many-body states are extracted from the von Neumann-Lindblad equation for the density operator. We mainly investigate the generation of sp biexcitons with two pulses of different polarizations sigma_{+} and sigma_{-}. The fast hole relaxation processes prevent a high-fidelity controlled operation on sp biexcitons and lead to the occupation of some transient states which can be optically probed. More importantly, the many-body structure of the transient states consists of two holes on the $s$ shell and antiparallel sp triplet states for electrons. Our simulations show that these triplet states are more stable against decoherence as they can only be damaged through slow electron relaxation. The configuration mixing due to correlation effects is also discussed.
We study the differential conductance in the Kondo regime of a quantum dot coupled to multiple leads. When the bias is applied symmetrically on two of the leads ($V$ and $-V$, as usual in experiments), while the others are grounded, the conductance t
hrough the biased leads always shows the expected enhancement at {it zero} bias. However, under asymmetrically applied bias ($V$ and $lambda V$, with $lambda>0$), a suppression - dip - appears in the differential conductance if the asymmetry coefficient $lambda$ is beyond a given threshold $lambda_0= sqrt[3]{1+r}$ determined by the ratio $r$ of the dot-leads couplings. This is a recipe to determine experimentally this ratio which is important for the quantum-dot devices. This finding is a direct result of the Keldysh transport formalism. For the illustration we use a many-lead Anderson Hamiltonian, the Green functions being calculated in the Lacroix approximation, which is generalized to the case of nonequilibrium.
