Walter Schottky explained a fundamental source of electrical noise: even a steady mean electric current can fluctuate because charge arrives in discrete units. His 1918 paper studies intrinsic limits to detecting weak signals with amplifying tubes, distinguishing charge discreteness from thermal motion. For independent charge-transfer events, the modern shot noise relation is for the one-sided current-noise power spectral density. Its dependence on the mean current makes the noise a probe of charge-transfer statistics, rather than merely a defect of an amplifier.[ref]
Über spontane Stromschwankungen in verschiedenen Elektrizitätsleitern by Walter Schottky. Annalen der Physik 57, 541–567 (1918), introduction and charge-discreteness contribution
A physicist who held a theoretical-physics professorship at Rostock from 1923 to 1927.[ref]
Walter Schottky by Stiftung Werner-von-Siemens-Ring. Werdegang: professor of theoretical physics at Rostock, 1923–1927; subsequent Siemens research
Portrait of Walter Schottky
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