Electrical transport through a single-electron transistor strongly coupled to an oscillator

TL;DR

This paper explores how strong coupling between a single-electron transistor and a nanomechanical oscillator affects electrical transport, noise, and higher current cumulants, revealing crossover behaviors and damping effects.

Contribution

It extends weak-coupling theories to strong coupling, providing numerical analysis of current cumulants and noise spectra in this regime.

Findings

Third cumulant depends on oscillator frequency in weak coupling

Crossover from frequency-dependent to independent third cumulant

Merging of noise peaks with increasing coupling strength

Abstract

We investigate electrical transport through a single-electron transistor coupled to a nanomechanical oscillator. Using a combination of a master-equation approach and a numerical Monte Carlo method, we calculate the average current and the current noise in the strong-coupling regime, studying deviations from previously derived analytic results valid in the limit of weak-coupling. After generalizing the weak-coupling theory to enable the calculation of higher cumulants of the current, we use our numerical approach to study how the third cumulant is affected in the strong-coupling regime. In this case, we find an interesting crossover between a weak-coupling transport regime where the third cumulant heavily depends on the frequency of the oscillator to one where it becomes practically independent of this parameter. Finally, we study the spectrum of the transport noise and show that the two peaks found in the weak-coupling limit merge on increasing the coupling strength. Our calculation of the frequency-dependence of the noise also allows to describe how transport-induced damping of the mechanical oscillations is affected in the strong-coupling regime.