Project A3: Waiting times and noise in transport through coupled nanostructures.

The present project will establish a deeper link between waiting time distributions 
and noise-related concepts such as full counting statistics (FCS) and frequency-
dependent noise correlation functions. In a first step, this link will be investigated
within ME for transport through coupled dissipative nanostructures such as double
quantum dots in order to explore the relation between the waiting time distributions
and FCS in Markovian and non-Markovian (strong electron-phonon coupling)
situations. For the latter, it is presently not known how to formulate FCS due to the
non-exponential decay of polaronic correlation functions, and we expect the waiting
times to provide valuable insights here. Second, the recently developed frequency-
dependent versions of higher-order shot-noise cumulants have counterparts in
higher-order waiting times -- these shall be derived and evaluated for concrete
quantum dot models at least in the Markovian regime. In the third and conceptually
most challenging part, waiting time distributions shall be formulated in the alternative
non-equilibrium Green function approach to transport and tested for simple situations
like the Fano-Anderson model where phonons are taken into account perturbatively.

Project leaders: Prof. Dr. T. Brandes [1],   Prof. Dr. E. Schöll