Shot noise in a coherent electron beam.

The counting statistics of beams of free electrons, released by field emission from a cold metal and propagating through a vacuum region, is studied. Since 1/f noise has been observed for field-emission current over the frequency 10[sup 2] to 10[sup 5] Hz, electron counts were taken with a sampling rate of 2.3×10[sup 6] samples/s. The probability distributions, which are distorted by the presence of a dead time, are compared with dead-time-corrected Poissonian and verified that the Poissonian describes the probability distributions by means of the χ[sup 2] test of the distributions. The present work shows that shot noise suppression due to correlated electron transmission induced by the Pauli exclusion principle could be detected using a field-emission electron beam. © 2000 American Institute of Physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]