Determination of the phase shifts for interacting electrons connected to reservoirs

We describe a formulation to deduce the phase shifts, which determine the ground-state properties of interacting quantum-dot systems with the inversion symmetry, from the fixed-point eigenvalues of the numerical renormalization group (NRG). Our approach does not assume the specific form of the Hamiltonian nor the electron-hole symmetry, and it is applicable to a wide class of quantum impurities connected to noninteracting leads. We apply the method to a triple dot which is described by a three-site Hubbard chain connected to two noninteracting leads, and calculate the dc conductance away from half-filling. The conductance shows the typical Kondo plateaus of the Unitary limit g similar or equal to 2e(2)/h in some regions of the onsite energy epsilon(d), at which the total number of electrons N-el, in the three dots is odd, i.e., N-el similar or equal to 1, 3 and 5. In contrast, the conductance shows a wide minimum in the regions Of epsilon(d) corresponding to even number of electrons N-el similar or equal to 2 and 4. We also discuss the parallel conductance of the triple dot connected transversely to four leads, and show that it can be deduced from the two phase shifts defined in the two-lead case.