Full-counting statistics of transient energy current in mesoscopic systems

Abstract

We investigate the full-counting statistics (FCS) of energy flow carried by electrons in the transient regime. Based on a two-measurement scheme, we formulate a nonequilibrium Keldysh Green's function theory to compute the generating function for FCS of energy transport. Specifically, we express the generating function using the path integral along the Keldysh contour and obtain an exact solution of the generating function using the Grassmann algebra. With this formalism, we calculate the transient energy current and higher-order cumulants for both single- and double-quantum-dot (QD) systems in the transient regime. To examine the finite bandwidth effect of leads to the FCS of energy transport, we have used an exact solvable model with a Lorentizian linewidth where all nonequilibrium Green's functions can be solved exactly in the time domain. It is found that the transient energy current exhibits damped oscillatory behavior. For the single quantum dot system the frequency of oscillation is independent of bandwidth of the leads while the decay rate of the oscillation amplitude is determined by the lifetime of resonant state which increases as the bandwidth decreases. At short times, a universal scaling of maximum amplitude of normalized cumulants is identified for the single-QD system. For the double-QD system, the damped oscillation of energy current is dominated by Rabi oscillation with frequency approximately proportional to the coupling constant between two quantum dots. In general, the transient energy current increases when the coupling between two QDs is stronger. However, when the interdot coupling is larger than half of the external bias the transient energy current is suppressed significantly. All these results can be understood analytically.