Abstract
Transport through zero-dimensional states in a tunneling barrier can occur via co-tunneling, wherein a carrier occupying a state outside the range of energies between the chemical potentials of the two leads hops to a lead, and within the brief time permitted by the energy-time uncertainty relationship the occupancy is replenished from the other lead. Here, we calculate the current in such junctions using a Lindblad formalism within the Markovian approximation. We consider transport in the Coulomb blockade regime with spin-polarized leads and a magnetic field smaller than the coercive field of either lead. Dependences on magnetic field and lead spin polarization of the spin blockade, decoherence, and spin lifetime of the subsystems of this model are calculated.