Local noise in a diffusive conductor

The control and measurement of local non-equilibrium configurations is of utmost importance in applications on energy harvesting, thermoelectrics and heat management in nano-electronics. This challenging task can be achieved with the help of various local probes, prominent examples including superconducting or quantum dot based tunnel junctions, classical and quantum resistors, and Raman thermography. Beyond time-averaged properties, valuable information can also be gained from spontaneous fluctuations of current (noise). From these perspective, however, a fundamental constraint is set by current conservation, which makes noise a characteristic of the whole conductor, rather than some part of it. Here we demonstrate how to remove this obstacle and pick up a local noise temperature of a current biased diffusive conductor with the help of a miniature noise probe. This approach is virtually noninvasive and extends primary local measurements towards strongly non-equilibrium regimes.Comment: minor revision, accepted in Scientific Report

Noise thermometry applied to thermoelectric measurements in InAs nanowires

We apply noise thermometry to characterize charge and thermoelectric transport in single InAs nanowires (NWs) at a bath temperature of 4.2 K. Shot noise measurements identify elastic diffusive transport in our NWs with negligible electron-phonon interaction. This enables us to set up a measurement of the diffusion thermopower. Unlike in previous approaches, we make use of a primary electronic noise thermometry to calibrate a thermal bias across the NW. In particular, this enables us to apply a contact heating scheme, which is much more efficient in creating the thermal bias as compared to conventional substrate heating. The measured thermoelectric Seebeck coefficient exhibits strong mesoscopic fluctuations in dependence on the back-gate voltage that is used to tune the NW carrier density. We analyze the transport and thermoelectric data in terms of approximate Mott's thermopower relation and to evaluate a gate-voltage to Fermi energy conversion factor