Full counting statistics concerns the stochastic transport of electrons in mesoscopic structures. Recently it has been shown that the charge transport statistics for noninteracting electrons in a two-terminal system is always generalized binomial: it can be decomposed into independent singleparticle events, and the zeros of the generating function are real and negative. Here we investigate how the zeros of the generating function move into the complex plane due to interactions and demonstrate that the positions of the zeros can be detected using high-order factorial cumulants. As an illustrative example we consider electron transport through a Coulomb blockade quantum dot for which we show that the interactions on the quantum dot are clearly visible in the high-order factorial cumulants. Our findings are important for understanding the influence of interactions on counting statistics, and the characterization in terms of zeros of the generating function provides us with a simple interpretation of recent experiments, where high-order statistics have been measured.
We employ a single-charge counting technique to measure the full counting statistics (FCS) of Andreev events in which Cooper pairs are either produced from electrons that are reflected as holes at a superconductor/normal-metal interface or annihilated in the reverse process. The FCS consists of quiet periods with no Andreev processes, interrupted by the tunneling of a single electron that triggers an avalanche of Andreev events giving rise to strongly super-Poissonian distributions.
We discuss time-dependent factorial cumulants in interacting nano-scale
systems. Recent theoretical work has shown that the full counting statistics of
non-interacting electrons in a two-terminal conductor is always generalized
binomial and the zeros of the generating function are consequently real and
negative. However, as interactions are introduced in the transport, the zeros
of the generating function may become complex. This has measurable
consequences: With the zeros of the generating function moving away from the
real-axis, the high-order factorial cumulants of the transport become
oscillatory functions of time. Here we demonstrate this phenomenon on a model
of charge transport through coherently coupled quantum dots attached to
voltage-biased electrodes. Without interactions, the factorial cumulants are
monotonic functions of the observation time. In contrast, as interactions are
introduced, the factorial cumulants oscillate strongly as functions of time. We
comment on possible measurements of oscillating factorial cumulants and outline
several avenues for further investigations.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, invited contribution to special issue on
'Quantum Transport beyond DC' in the Journal of Computational Electronic
Similarly to the recently obtained result for two-terminal systems, we show that there are constraints on the full counting statistics for non-interacting fermions in multi-terminal contacts. In contrast to the two-terminal result, however, there is no factorization property in the multi-terminal case.
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