Giant current fluctuations in an overheated single electron transistor

Abstract

Interplay of cotunneling and single-electron tunneling in a thermally isolated single-electron transistor (SET) leads to peculiar overheating effects. In particular, there is an interesting crossover interval where the competition between cotunneling and single-electron tunneling changes to the dominance of the latter. In this interval, the current exhibits anomalous sensitivity to the effective electron temperature of the transistor island and its fluctuations. We present a detailed study of the current and temperature fluctuations at this interesting point. The methods implemented allow for a complete characterization of the distribution of the fluctuating quantities, well beyond the Gaussian approximation. We reveal and explore the parameter range where, for sufficiently small transistor islands, the current fluctuations become gigantic. In this regime, the optimal value of the current, its expectation value, and its standard deviation differ from each other by parametrically large factors. This situation is unique for transport in nanostructures and for electron transport in general. The origin of this spectacular effect is the exponential sensitivity of the current to the fluctuating effective temperature.

10 pages, 11 figures

References in corpus (10)

• Opportunities for mesoscopics in thermometry and refrigeration: Physics and applications
• Full Counting Statistics of Charge Transfer in Coulomb Blockade Systems
• Keldysh technique and non-linear sigma-model: basic principles and applications
• Noise of a Quantum-Dot System in the Cotunneling Regime
• Circuit Theory for Full Counting Statistics in Multi-Terminal Circuits
• Statistics of Heat Transfer in Mesoscopic Circuits
• Statistics of temperature fluctuations in an electron system out of equilibrium
• Fully Overheated Single-Electron Transistor
• Electron-electron scattering effects on the Full Counting Statistics of Mesoscopic Conductors
• Measurement of the shot noise in a single electron transistor

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Fluctuation theorem for heat transport probed by a thermal electrode
• Manifestly non-Gaussian fluctuations in superconductor-normal metal tunnel nanostructures
• Theory of temperature fluctuation statistics in superconductor-normal metal tunnel structures
• Statistics of energy dissipation in a quantum dot operating in the cotunneling regime
• Interplay of charge and heat transport in a nano-junction in the out-of-equilibrium cotunneling regime
• Full-counting statistics of information content and heat quantity in the steady state and the optimum capacity
• Noise signatures of a charged Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev dot in mesoscopic transport