Quantum-to-Classical Crossover in Single-electron Emitter

TL;DR

This paper studies how increasing temperature causes a single-electron emitter to transition from quantum coherent emission to classical Poissonian behavior, revealing the role of thermal fluctuations and electron correlations.

Contribution

It demonstrates the temperature-driven quantum-to-classical crossover in single-electron emission and characterizes the decay of electron correlations with temperature increase.

Findings

Emission becomes Poissonian at high temperatures

Electron correlations diminish rapidly with temperature

Quantum-to-classical crossover occurs similarly for two-electron charge pulses

Abstract

We investigate the temperature-driven quantum-to-classical crossover in a single-electron emitter. The emitter is composed of a quantum conductor and an electrode, which is coupled via an Ohmic contact. At zero temperature, it has been shown that a single electron can be injected coherently by applying an unit-charge Lorentzian pulse on the electrode. As the electrode temperature increases, we show that the electron emission approaches a time-dependence Poisson process at long times. The Poissonian character is demonstrated from the time-resolved full counting statistics. In the meantime, we show that the emission events remain correlated, which is due to the Pauli exclusion principle. The correlation is revealed from the emission rates of individual electrons, from which a characteristic correlation time can be extracted. The correlation time drops rapidly as the electrode temperature increases, indicating that correlation can only play a non-negligible role at short times in the high-temperature limit. By using the same procedure, we further show that the quantum-to-classical crossover exhibits similar features when the emission is driven by a Lorentzian pulse carrying two electron charge. Our results show how the electron emission process is affected by thermal fluctuations in a single-electron emitter.