The conservation laws in mesoscopic noise, and their observable consequences

Abstract

Quantum kinetic theory is founded upon the action of the conservation laws within systems that may be both strongly driven and subject to strong interparticle couplings. For any open mesoscopic conductor, conservation must act globally as well as microscopically. In maintaining global conservation, the explicit interplay of the mesoscopic device and its bounding leads is paramount. Within standard quantum kinetics, this device-lead interaction imposes very strong constraints on the possible behavior of the noise spectral density. That is so over the whole range of driving currents. We review a fully quantum kinetic theory of mesoscopic conduction and discuss the experimental consequences of its conserving constraints, with special reference to the experiment of Reznikov et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, pp. 3340-3343, 1995.