Electron waiting times in coherent conductors are correlated

TL;DR

This paper develops a theoretical framework to analyze electron waiting times in coherent conductors, revealing correlations due to fermionic statistics and extending to multiple channels and time-dependent voltages.

Contribution

The authors introduce a formalism for joint distributions of electron waiting times in scattering conductors, including correlations and multi-channel analysis, applicable to various quantum transport scenarios.

Findings

Successive electron waiting times are correlated due to fermionic statistics.

The formalism can handle waiting times between different outgoing channels.

Application to quantum point contacts with static and periodic voltages.

Abstract

We evaluate the joint distributions of electron waiting times in coherent conductors described by scattering theory. Successive electron waiting times in a single-channel conductor are found to be correlated due to the fermionic statistics encoded in the many-body state. Our formalism allows us also to investigate the waiting times between charge transfer events in different outgoing channels. As an application we consider a quantum point contact in a chiral setup with one or both input channels biased by either a static or a time-dependent periodic voltage described by Floquet theory. The theoretical framework developed here can be applied to a variety of scattering problems and can in a straightforward manner be extended to joint distributions of several electron waiting times.