COUNTING ELECTRICAL CHARGES: A PROBLEM OF THERMAL ESCAPE AND QUANTUM TUNNELING IN PRESENCE OF NON-GAUSSIAN NOISE

Electrical noise produced when charges flow through a mesoscopic conductor is non-Gaussian, where higher order cumulants carry valuable information about the microscopic transport process. In these notes we briefly discuss the experimental situation and show that theoretical descriptions for the detection of electrical noise with Josephson junctions lead to generalizations of classical and quantum theories, respectively, for decay rates out of metastable states.