Stationary and Transient Leakage Current in the Pauli Spin Blockade

We study the effects of cotunneling and a nonuniform Zeeman splitting on the stationary and transient leakage current through a double quantum dot in the Pauli spin blockade regime. We find that the stationary current due to cotunneling vanishes at low temperature and large applied magnetic field, allowing for the dynamical (rapid) preparation of a pure spin ground state, even at large voltage bias. Additionally, we analyze current that flows between blocking events, characterized, in general, by a fractional effective charge e^*. This charge can be used as a sensitive probe of spin-relaxation mechanisms and can be used to determine the visibility of Rabi oscillations.