Nonlinear Steady-State Mesoscopic Transport, I. Formalism

We present an approach to steady-state mesoscopic transport based on the maximum entropy principle formulation of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. This approach is valid in the nonlinear regime of high current, and yields the quantization observed in the integer quantum Hall effect at large currents. A key ingredient of this approach, and its success in explaining high-precision Hall measurements, is that the occupancy of single-electron states depends on their current as well as their energy. This suggests that the reservoir picture commonly used in mesoscopic transport is unsatisfactory outside of linear response.