Publication details

Publicaciones

Current and heat fluctuations in mesoscopic systems

Arjona, Vicente (Supervisor: Sánchez, David)
Master Thesis , (2015)

The study of nanostructures is a topic of great interest nowadays, the carrier transport study being one the more active areas of research. Using the Landauer-Buttiker formalism, a simple and widespread model to investigate different phenomena in mesoscopic physics, we derive general expressions for the charge and heat currents, the noise properties being particularly of our interest. We analyze the thermal noise, an intrinsic noise obtained when the system is evaluated at equilibrium; and shot noise, produced by the discreteness of the charge of the carriers and which provides information about the nature of the carriers. Additionally, we study the thermoelectric noise, which arises when different thermal biases are introduced (as a Seebeck effect for charge noise); and electrothermal noise, which is observed when the system is driven out of equilibrium by applying different voltage perturbations (as a Peltier effect for heat noise). Finally, those latter noises are analyzed for a prototypical quantum conductor: a quantum point contact modelled as a saddle-point constriction.