Condensed Matter Seminars

Fluctuations of the electrical current running through a nano-scale conductor reveal information beyond what is contained in the conductance alone. In this talk I will give an overview of my recent works on counting statistics, the stochastic theory of charge transport in nanostructures. As an example, I will show how current fluctuations can be a useful tool to detect mechanical bistabilities and frequency shifts in nanoelectromechanical systems. While most works have focused on systems whose dynamics is Markovian, I will discuss the influence of memory effects on the counting statistics, illustrated with a model of transport through a double quantum dot in a dissipative environment. Finally, I show that high-order current-current correlation functions (cumulants) in general oscillate as functions of basically any system parameter. A prediction that has been confirmed by recent experiments, as I will describe. Recent papers: C. Flindt et al., PRL 100, 150601 (2008), PNAS 106, 10116 (2009)