Thermal conductance in a spin-boson model: Cotunneling and low-temperature properties

Abstract

Bosonic thermal transport through a two-level system is analyzed at temperatures below and comparable to the two-level energy splitting. It is shown that in the low-temperature regime transport is dominated by correlated two-boson processes analogous to electron cotunneling in quantum dots under Coulomb blockade. We present a detailed analysis of the sequential-cotunneling crossover and obtain essentially an analytic description of the transport problem. Perturbative analysis is complemented by employing scaling properties of the Ohmic spin-boson model, allowing us to extract an anomalous low-temperature scaling of thermal conductance.