Over-Bias Light Emission due to Higher Order Quantum Noise of a Tunnel Junction

Abstract

Understanding tunneling from an atomically sharp tip to a metallic surface requires to account for interactions on a nanoscopic scale. Inelastic tunneling of electrons generates emission of photons, whose energies intuitively should be limited by the applied bias voltage. However, experiments by Schull et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 057401 (2009)] indicate that more complex processes involving the interaction of electrons with plasmon polaritons lead to photon emission characterized by over-bias energies. We propose a model of this observation in analogy to dynamical Coulomb blockade, originally developed for treating the electronic environment in mesoscopic circuits. We explain the experimental finding quantitatively by the correlated tunneling of two electrons interacting with an LRC circuit modeling the local plasmon-polariton mode. To explain the over-bias emission, the non-Gaussian statistics of the tunneling dynamics of the electrons is essential.

5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Dynamical Coulomb Blockade of Shot Noise
• Two-Electron Photon Emission From Metallic Quantum Wells
• High Frequency Dynamics and Third Cumulant of Quantum Noise
• Quantum Tunneling Detection of Two-photon and Two-electron Processes

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