1 N ov 2 00 2 SHOT NOISE OF COTUNNELING CURRENT

We study the noise of the cotunneling current through one or several tunnel-coupled quantum dots in the Coulomb blockade regime. The various regimes of weak and strong, elastic and inelastic cotunneling are analyzed for quantum-dot systems (QDS) with few-level, nearly-degenerate, and continuous electronic spectra. In the case of weak cotunneling we prove a non-equilibrium fluctuation-dissipation theorem which leads to a universal expression for the noise-to-current ratio (Fano factor). The noise of strong inelastic cotunneling can be super-Poissonian due to switching between QDS states carrying currents of different strengths. The transport through a double-dot (DD) system shows an Aharonov-Bohm effect both in noise and current. In the case of cotunneling through a QDS with a continuous energy spectrum the Fano factor is very close to one.