Determining the parameters of a random telegraph signal by digital low pass filtering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a digital low pass filtering method to accurately determine switching rates of random telegraph signals, especially useful when detector response times are slow, demonstrated on single-electron transistor data.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel approach combining digital filtering and cumulant analysis to extract telegraph signal parameters in challenging detection scenarios.

Findings

Effective in slow detector regimes

Accurately estimates switching rates

Validated on single-electron transistor signals

Abstract

We propose a method to determine the switching rates of a random telegraph signal. We apply digital low pass filtering with varying bandwidth to the raw signal, evaluate the cumulants of the resulting distributions and compare them with the analytical prediction. This technique is useful in case of a slow detector with response time comparable to the time interval between the switching events. We demonstrate the efficiency of this method by analyzing random telegraph signals generated by individual charge tunneling events in metallic single-electron transistors.