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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen

TT 9: Quantum Dots, Quantum Wires, Point Contacts

TT 9.12: Talk

Monday, March 12, 2018, 12:45–13:00, HFT-FT 101

Fractionalization of charge in incoherent, sequential electron transport — •Roman-Pascal Riwar — JARA Institute for Quantum Information (PGI-11), Forschungszentrum Jülich, 52425 Jülich, Germany

The notion of a fractional charge was up until now reserved for quasiparticle excitations emerging from strongly correlated, topological quantum systems, such as Laughlin quasiparticles in the fractional quantum Hall effect or, more recently, parafermions. Here, we argue that a topological braiding transition in the full counting statistics can lead to a fractionalisation of the charge - strikingly - in fully incoherent electron transport out of equilibrium. Importantly, this effect emerges already on the level of standard sequential tunneling through quantum dots and metallic islands, making its observation experimentally accessible to a large and easily controllable class of systems. We show that the fractional charge and the underlying topological invariants can be measured by means of the detector's waiting time distribution. Based on its topology, we find that this fractional charge effect can, in spite of its very different physical origin, be regarded as a quasiclassical analogy to the fractional transport of Cooper pairs in topological Josephson junctions.