Full Counting Statistics of Charge Transfer in Coulomb Blockade Systems

TL;DR

This paper develops a general method to evaluate the full counting statistics of charge transfer in strongly interacting Coulomb blockade systems, revealing how interactions suppress large current fluctuations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel scheme for calculating FCS in Coulomb blockade systems, bridging scattering and master equation approaches, and applies it to various mesoscopic setups.

Findings

Coulomb interaction suppresses large current fluctuations.

Established equivalence between scattering and master equation approaches for FCS.

Demonstrated the scheme on single resonant level and Coulomb blockade islands.

Abstract

Full counting statistics (FCS) of charge transfer in mesoscopic systems has recently become a subject of significant interest, since it proves to reveal an important information about the system which can be hardly assessed by other means. While the previous research mostly addressed the FCS of non- interacting systems, the present paper deals with the FCS in the limit of strong interaction. In this Coulomb blockade limit the electron dynamics is known to be governed by a master equation. We develop a general scheme to evaluate the FCS in such case, this being the main result of the work presented. We illustrate the scheme, by applying it to concrete systems. For generic case of a single resonant level we establish the equivalence of scattering and master equation approach to FCS. Further we study a single Coulomb blockade island with two and three leads attached and compare the FCS in this case with our recent results concerning an open dot either with two and three terminals. We demonstrate that Coulomb interaction suppresses the relative probabilities of large current fluctuations.