Distribution of residence times as a marker to distinguish different pathways for quantum transport

Abstract

Electron transport through a nanoscale system is an inherently stochastic quantum mechanical process. Electric current is a time series of electron tunnelling events separated by random intervals. Thermal and quantum noise are two sources of this randomness. In this paper, we used the quantum master equation to consider the following questions: (i) Given that an electron has tunnelled into the electronically unoccupied system from the source electrode at some particular time, how long is it until an electron tunnels out to the drain electrode to leave the system electronically unoccupied, where there were no intermediate tunnelling events ("the" tunnelling path)? (ii) Given that an electron has tunnelled into the unoccupied system from the source electrode at some particular time, how long is it until an electron tunnels out to the drain electrode to leave the system electronically unoccupied, where there were no intermediate tunnelling events ("an" tunnelling path)? (iii) What are the distributions of these times? We show that electron correlations suppress the difference between "the" and "an" electron tunnelling paths.

5 pages, 2 figures

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Cited by in corpus (13)

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• Non-renewal statistics for electron transport in a molecular junction with electron-vibration interaction
• Distribution of waiting times between electron cotunnelings
• Non-renewal statistics in quantum transport through the eyes of first-passage and waiting time distributions
• Electron Waiting Times in a Strongly Interacting Quantum Dot: Interaction Effects and Higher-Order Tunneling Processes
• Electronic statistics-on-demand: bunching, anti-bunching, positive and negative correlations in a molecular spin-valve
• Waiting time distributions in a two-level fluctuator coupled to a superconducting charge detector
• Waiting time between charging and discharging processes in molecular junctions
• Fluctuating-time and full counting statistics for quantum transport in a system with internal telegraphic noise
• Coherent time-dependent oscillations and temporal correlations in triangular triple quantum dots