Quantum transport in chaotic cavities with tunnel barriers

Abstract

We bring together the semiclassical approximation, matrix integrals and the theory of symmetric polynomials in order to solve a long standing problem in the field of quantum chaos: to compute transport moments when tunnel barriers are present and the number of open channels, $M$, is small. In contrast to previous approaches, ours is non-perturbative in $M$; instead, we arrive at an explicit expression in the form of a power series in the barrier's reflectivity, whose coefficients are rational functions of $M$. For general moments we must require that the barriers are equal and time reversal symmetry is broken, but for conductance we treat the general situation. Our method accounts for exponentially small non-perturbative terms that were not accessible to previous semiclassical approaches. We also show how to include more than two leads in the system.