Single-Electron Tunneling and the Fluctuation Theorem

TL;DR

This paper investigates single-electron tunneling in a double quantum dot system, testing the Fluctuation Theorem through full-counting statistics, and analyzes environmental fluctuations and detector bandwidth effects on the measurements.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative explanation of how environmental fluctuations and detector bandwidth influence the Fluctuation Theorem in single-electron tunneling experiments.

Findings

Environmental fluctuations enhance the effective temperature in the FT.

Finite detector bandwidth affects the accuracy of tunneling measurements.

The study offers a model to account for shot noise and bandwidth effects.

Abstract

Experiments on the direction-resolved full-counting statistics of single-electron tunneling allow testing the fundamentally important Fluctuation Theorem (FT). At the same time, the FT provides a frame for analyzing such data. Here we consider tunneling through a double quantum dot system which is coupled capacitively to a quantum point contact (QPC) detector. Fluctuations of the environment, including the shot noise of the QPC, lead to an enhancement of the effective temperature in the FT. We provide a quantitative explanation of this effect; in addition we discuss the influence of the finite detector bandwidth on the measurements.