Strong quantum memory at resonant Fermi edges revealed by shot noise

Studies of non-equilibrium current fluctuations enable assessing correlations involved in quantum transport through nanoscale conductors. They provide additional information to the mean current on charge statistics and the presence of coherence, dissipation, disorder, or entanglement. Shot noise, being a temporal integral of the current autocorrelation function, reveals dynamical information. In particular, it detects presence of non-Markovian dynamics, i.e., memory, within open systems, which has been subject of many current theoretical studies. We report on low-temperature shot noise measurements of electronic transport through InAs quantum dots in the Fermi-edge singularity regime and show that it exhibits strong memory effects caused by quantum correlations between the dot and fermionic reservoirs. Our work, apart from addressing noise in archetypical strongly correlated system of prime interest, discloses generic quantum dynamical mechanism occurring at interacting resonant Fermi edges.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Full quantum distribution of contrast in interference experiments between interacting one dimensional Bose liquids

We analyze interference experiments for a pair of independent one dimensional condensates of interacting bosonic atoms at zero temperature. We show that the distribution function of fringe amplitudes contains non-trivial information about non-local correlations within individual condensates and can be calculated explicitly using methods of conformal field theory. We point out interesting relations between these distribution functions, the partition function for a quantum impurity in a one-dimensional Luttinger liquid, and transfer matrices of conformal field theories. We demonstrate the connection between interference experiments in cold atoms and a variety of statistical models ranging from stochastic growth models to two dimensional quantum gravity. Such connection can be used to design a quantum simulator of unusual two-dimensional models described by nonunitary conformal field theories with negative central charges.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures; Accepted for publication in Nature Physic

Current measurement by real-time counting of single electrons

The fact that electrical current is carried by individual charges has been known for over 100 years, yet this discreteness has not been directly observed so far. Almost all current measurements involve measuring the voltage drop across a resistor, using Ohm's law, in which the discrete nature of charge does not come into play. However, by sending a direct current through a microelectronic circuit with a chain of islands connected by small tunnel junctions, the individual electrons can be observed one by one. The quantum mechanical tunnelling of single charges in this one-dimensional array is time correlated, and consequently the detected signal has the average frequency f=I/e, where I is the current and e is the electron charge. Here we report a direct observation of these time-correlated single-electron tunnelling oscillations, and show electron counting in the range 5 fA-1 pA. This represents a fundamentally new way to measure extremely small currents, without offset or drift. Moreover, our current measurement, which is based on electron counting, is self-calibrated, as the measured frequency is related to the current only by a natural constant.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures; v2: minor revisions, 2 refs added, words added to title, typos correcte

Full Counting Statistics of Superconductor--Normal-Metal Heterostructures

The article develops a powerful theoretical tool to obtain the full counting statistics. By a slight extension of the standard Keldysh method we can access immediately all correlation functions of the current operator. Embedded in a quantum generalization of the circuit theory of electronic transport, we are able to study the full counting statistics of a large class of two-terminal contacts and multi-terminal structures, containing superconductors and normal metals as elements. The practical use of the method is demonstrated in many examples.Comment: 35 pages, contribution to "Quantum Noise", ed. by Yu.V. Nazarov and Ya.M. Blanter, minor changes in text, references adde

Noisy Kondo impurities

The anti-ferromagnetic coupling of a magnetic impurity carrying a spin with the conduction electrons spins of a host metal is the basic mechanism responsible for the increase of the resistance of an alloy such as Cu${}_{0.998}$Fe${}_{0.002}$ at low temperature, as originally suggested by Kondo . This coupling has emerged as a very generic property of localized electronic states coupled to a continuum . The possibility to design artificial controllable magnetic impurities in nanoscopic conductors has opened a path to study this many body phenomenon in unusual situations as compared to the initial one and, in particular, in out of equilibrium situations. So far, measurements have focused on the average current. Here, we report on \textit{current fluctuations} (noise) measurements in artificial Kondo impurities made in carbon nanotube devices. We find a striking enhancement of the current noise within the Kondo resonance, in contradiction with simple non-interacting theories. Our findings provide a test bench for one of the most important many-body theories of condensed matter in out of equilibrium situations and shed light on the noise properties of highly conductive molecular devices.Comment: minor differences with published versio

Measurement of finite-frequency current statistics in a single-electron transistor

Electron transport in nano-scale structures is strongly influenced by the Coulomb interaction which gives rise to correlations in the stream of charges and leaves clear fingerprints in the fluctuations of the electrical current. A complete understanding of the underlying physical processes requires measurements of the electrical fluctuations on all time and frequency scales, but experiments have so far been restricted to fixed frequency ranges as broadband detection of current fluctuations is an inherently difficult experimental procedure. Here we demonstrate that the electrical fluctuations in a single electron transistor (SET) can be accurately measured on all relevant frequencies using a nearby quantum point contact for on-chip real-time detection of the current pulses in the SET. We have directly measured the frequency-dependent current statistics and hereby fully characterized the fundamental tunneling processes in the SET. Our experiment paves the way for future investigations of interaction and coherence induced correlation effects in quantum transport.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, published in Nature Communications (open access

Universal Resistances of the Quantum RC circuit

We examine the concept of universal quantized resistance in the AC regime through the fully coherent quantum RC circuit comprising a cavity (dot) capacitively coupled to a gate and connected via a single spin-polarized channel to a reservoir lead. As a result of quantum effects such as the Coulomb interaction in the cavity and global phase coherence, we show that the charge relaxation resistance $R_q$ is identical for weak and large transmissions and it changes from $h/2e^2$ to $h/e^2$ when the frequency (times $\hbar$) exceeds the level spacing of the cavity; $h$ is the Planck constant and $e$ the electron charge. For large cavities, we formulate a correspondence between the charge relaxation resistance $h/e^2$ and the Korringa-Shiba relation of the Kondo model. Furthermore, we introduce a general class of models, for which the charge relaxation resistance is universal. Our results emphasize that the charge relaxation resistance is a key observable to understand the dynamics of strongly correlated systems.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

Singularities of the Magnon Boundstate S-Matrix

We study the conjectured exact S-matrix for the scattering of BPS magnon boundstates in the spin-chain description of planar N=4 SUSY Yang-Mills. The conjectured S-matrix exhibits both simple and double poles at complex momenta. Some of these poles lie parametrically close to the real axis in momentum space on the branch where particle energies are positive. We show that all such poles are precisely accounted for by physical processes involving one or more on-shell intermediate particles belonging to the known BPS spectrum.Comment: 32 pages, 9 figure

Metallic, magnetic and molecular nanocontacts

Scanning tunnelling microscopy and break-junction experiments realize metallic and molecular nanocontacts that act as ideal one-dimensional channels between macroscopic electrodes. Emergent nanoscale phenomena typical of these systems encompass structural, mechanical, electronic, transport, and magnetic properties. This Review focuses on the theoretical explanation of some of these properties obtained with the help of first-principles methods. By tracing parallel theoretical and experimental developments from the discovery of nanowire formation and conductance quantization in gold nanowires to recent observations of emergent magnetism and Kondo correlations, we exemplify the main concepts and ingredients needed to bring together ab initio calculations and physical observations. It can be anticipated that diode, sensor, spin-valve and spin-filter functionalities relevant for spintronics and molecular electronics applications will benefit from the physical understanding thus obtained

Subzone control method of stratum ventilation for thermal comfort improvement

The conventional control method of a collective ventilation (e.g., stratum ventilation) controls the averaged thermal environment in the occupied zone to satisfy the averaged thermal preference of a group of occupants. However, the averaged thermal environment in the occupied zone is not the same as the microclimates of the occupants, because the thermal environment in the occupied zone is not absolutely uniform. Moreover, the averaged thermal preference of the occupants could deviate from the individual thermal preferences, because the occupants could have different individual thermal preferences. This study proposes a subzone control method for stratum ventilation to improve thermal comfort. The proposed method divides the occupied zone into subzones, and controls the microclimates of the subzones to satisfy the thermal preferences of the respective subzones. Experiments in a stratum-ventilated classroom are conducted to model and validate the Predicted Mean Votes (PMVs) of the subzones, with a mean absolute error between 0.05 scale and 0.14 scale. Using the PMV models, the supply air parameters are optimized to minimize the deviation between the PMVs of the subzones and the respective thermal preferences. Case studies show that the proposed method can fulfill the thermal constraints of all subzones for thermal comfort, while the conventional method fails. The proposed method further improves thermal comfort by reducing the deviation of the achieved PMVs of subzones from the preferred ones by 17.6%–41.5% as compared with the conventional method. The proposed method is also promising for other collective ventilations (e.g., mixing ventilation and displacement ventilation)