Waiting time distribution for trains of quantized electron pulses

Abstract

We consider a sequence of quantized Lorentzian pulses of non-interacting electrons impinging on a quantum point contact (QPC) and study the waiting time distribution (WTD), for any transmission and any number of pulses. As the degree of overlap between the electronic wave functions is tuned, the WTD reveals how the correlations between particles are modified. In the weak overlap regime, the WTD is made of several equidistant peaks, separated by the same period as the incoming pulses, contained in an almost exponentially decaying envelope. In the other limit, the WTD of a single quantum channel subjected to a constant voltage is recovered. In both cases, the WTD stresses the difference between the fluctuations induced by the scatterer and the ones encoded in the incoming quantum state. A clear cross-over between these two situations is studied with numerical and analytical calculations based on scattering theory.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure