Anomalous Nonlinear Shot Noise at High Voltage Bias

Since the work of Walter Schottky, it is known that the shot-noise power for a completely uncorrelated set of electrons increases linearly with the time-averaged current. At zero temperature and in the absence of inelastic scattering, the linearity relation between noise power and average current is quite robust, in many cases even for correlated electrons. Through high-bias shot-noise measurements on single Au atom point contacts, we find that the noise power in the high-bias regime shows highly nonlinear behavior even leading to a decrease in shot noise with voltage. We explain this nonlinearity using a model based on quantum interference of electron waves with varying path difference due to scattering from randomly distributed defect sites in the leads, which makes the transmission probability for these electrons both energy and voltage dependent.