Energy transport and fluctuations in small conductors

The Landauer-Büttiker formalism provides a simple and insightful way for investigating many phenomena in mesoscopic physics. By this approach we derive general formulas for the energy currents and apply them to the basic setups. Of particular interest are the noise properties. We show that energy current fluctuations can be induced by zero-point fluctuations, and we discuss the implications of this result.

Figure 1

Two-terminal conductor in the presence of a temperature gradient: $T_1\ne T_2$.

Figure 2

Two-terminal conductor with a voltage probe. A fraction of the energy carriers are scattered coherently and the others are scattered incoherently in the forward and backward direction.