Understanding the interplay between many-body phenomena and nonequilibrium in systems with entangled spin and orbital degrees of freedom is a central objective in nanoelectronics. We demonstrate that the combination of Coulomb interaction, spin-orbit coupling, and valley mixing results in a particular selection of the inelastic virtual processes contributing to the Kondo resonance in carbon nanotubes at low temperatures. This effect is dictated by conjugation properties of the underlying carbon nanotube spectrum at zero and finite magnetic field. Our measurements on a clean carbon nanotube are complemented by calculations based on a field-theoretical Keldysh approach to the nonequilibrium Kondo problem which well reproduces the rich experimental observations in Kondo transport.

• Received 1 August 2014
• Revised 2 March 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.91.155435