Observing temperature fluctuations of a mesoscopic electron system

Abstract

Almost a century ago, Johnson and Nyquist presented evidence of fluctuating electrical current and the governing fluctuation dissipation theorem (FDT). Whether, likewise, temperature T can fluctuate is a controversial topic and has led to scientific debates for several decades. To resolve this issue, there was an experiment initially in 1992 where the authors found good agreement between the FDT theory for heat and experiment on a macroscopic sample. A key question is what happens when we consider a nanoscale system with much fewer particles at 100 times lower temperatures. This challenge has not been addressed up to now, due to the demanding experimental requirement on fast and sensitive thermometry on a mesoscopic absorber. Here we observe equilibrium fluctuations of temperature in a canonical system of about 10^8 electrons exchanging energy with phonon bath at a fixed temperature. Moreover, temperature fluctuations under nonequilibrium conditions present a nontrivial dependence on the chemical potential bias of a hot electron source. These fundamental fluctuations of T set the ultimate lower bound of the energy resolution of a calorimeter.