Shot noise in coupled dots and the fractional charges

We consider the problem of shot noise in resonant tunneling through double quantum dots in the case of interacting particles. Using a many-body quantum mechanical description we evaluate the energy-dependent transmission probability, the total average current and the shot noise spectrum. Our results show that the obtained reduction of the noise spectrum, due to Coulomb interaction, can be interpret in terms of non-interacting particles with fractional charge like behavior. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.