Charge, spin, and heat shot noises in the absence of average currents: Conditions on bounds at zero and finite frequencies

TL;DR

This paper investigates the behavior of charge, spin, and heat shot noises in two-terminal mesoscopic conductors under nonequilibrium conditions, establishing bounds on these noises at zero and finite frequencies, and exploring how symmetry breaking affects these bounds.

Contribution

It derives bounds on zero-current shot noises for charge, spin, and heat, and analyzes how symmetry breaking influences these bounds at finite frequencies.

Findings

Equilibrium noise sets an upper bound on zero-current charge and spin shot noises.

Breaking spin and electron-hole symmetries can surpass heat transport bounds.

Charge noise bounds extend into the finite-frequency regime for two-terminal conductors.

Abstract

Nonequilibrium situations where selected currents are suppressed are of interest in fields like thermoelectrics and spintronics, raising the question of how the related noises behave. We study such zero-current charge, spin, and heat noises in a two-terminal mesoscopic conductor. In the presence of voltage, spin and temperature biases, the nonequilibrium (shot) noises of charge, spin, and heat can be arbitrarily large, even if their average currents vanish. However, as soon as a temperature bias is present, additional equilibrium (thermal-like) noise necessarily occurs. We show that this equilibrium noise sets an upper bound on the zero-current charge and spin shot noises, even if additional voltage or spin biases are present. We demonstrate that these bounds can be overcome for heat transport by breaking the spin and electron-hole symmetries, respectively. By contrast, we show that the bound on the charge noise for strictly two-terminal conductors even extends into the finite-frequency regime.