title: Transmission of information through mesoscopic scattering systems.
abstract: The storage and transmission of information is well defined using the notions of entropy, mutual information and channel capacity as formalized by Shannon. These quantities are calculated for a quantum mesoscopic system in terms of scattering parameters. For a one-dimensional system, the mutual information is related to the thermal conductance. This relation allows to show that for an incident signal of power P, the channel capacity C has a universal upper bound given by C ≤ π√(2P/3h) independent of quantum statistics. A general framework is proposed which makes use of a natural underlying symplectic structure, to relate the entropy of a quantum mesoscopic system to the scattering matrix.
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Physics and Physics, Yale University, USA. eric@physics.technion.ac.il
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Akkermans