Phys. Rev. B 70, 115305 (2004) [6 pages]

Counting statistics of tunneling current

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L. S. Levitov1 and M. Reznikov2
1Department of Physics, Center for Materials Sciences and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
2Department of Physics, Solid State Institute, Technion, 32000 Haifa, Israel

Received 11 March 2004; published 13 September 2004

The form of electron counting statistics of the tunneling current noise in a generic many-body interacting electron system is obtained and universal relations between its different moments are derived. A generalized fluctuation-dissipation theorem providing a relation between current and noise at arbitrary bias-to-temperature ratio eVkBT is established in the tunneling Hamiltonian approximation. The third correlator of current fluctuations S3 (the skewness of the charge counting distribution) has a universal Schottky-type relation with the current and quasiparticle charge that holds in a wide bias voltage range, both at large and small eVkBT . The insensitivity of S3 to the Nyquist-Schottky crossover represents an advantage compared to the Schottky formula for the noise power. We discuss the possibility of using the correlator S3 for detecting quasiparticle charge at high temperatures.


©2004 The American Physical Society

URL: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.70.115305
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.70.115305
PACS: 72.70.+m, 73.50.Td, 74.40.+k

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