Coulomb effects in artificial molecules

We study the capacitance spectra of artificial molecules consisting of two and three coupled quantum dots from an extended Hubbard Hamiltonian model that takes into account quantum confinement, intra- and inter-dot Coulomb interaction and tunneling coupling between all single particle states in nearest neighbor dots. We find that, for weak coupling, the interdot Coulomb interaction dominates the formation of a collective molecular state. We also calculate the effects of correlations on the tunneling probability through the evaluation of the spectral weights, and corroborate the importance of selection rules for understanding experimental conductance spectra.