Counting Statistics of Mesoscopic Noise

The measurement performed by optical detectors, such as photon counters, is extended in the time domain, which makes it sensitive to temporal correlations of photons [1]. It has been known long ago in the theory of photodetection [2] that understanding photon counting distribution is essentially a problem of many-particle statistics. Similar considerations apply to the electrical noise measurement, which is fundamentally different from photodetection in that the electrons are not destroyed but just counted. The noise measurement, very much like photodetection, is a sensitive probe of temporal correlations between different transmitted electrons.