  We have derived a variational principle that defines the nonequilibrium
steady-state transport across a correlated impurity mimicking, e.g., a quantum
dot coupled to biased leads. This variational principle has been specialized to
a Gutzwiller's variational space, and applied to the study of the simple
single-orbital Anderson impurity model at half filling, finding a good
qualitative accord with the observed behavior in quantum dots for the expected
regime of values of the bias. Beyond the purely theoretical interest in the
formal definition of a variational principle in a nonequilibrium problem, the
particular methods proposed have the important advantage to be simple and
flexible enough to deal with more complicated systems and variational spaces.

Strongly Correlated Electrons;Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics