Error Mechanisms and Rates in Tunable-Barrier Single-Electron Turnstiles and CCD's

Published

November 1, 2004

Author(s)

Neil M. Zimmerman, Emmanouel S. Hourdakis

Abstract

Si-based single-electron tunneling (SET) devices have of late become an important alternative to the metal-based ones, both for general usage and in particular in electrical metrology. We have very recently been designing, fabricating, and measuring SET turnstiles, pumps, and CCD's using tunable barriers in silicon. Having shown the potencial of these devices, we wish to understand the error mechanisms which may manifest themselves, and to predict the level of these errors, in order to decide how feasible these devices will be. Inthis paper, we devote a substantial amount of analysis to the consideration of the "dynamical" error mechanism. This particular error considers how electrons split up as the barrier is raised, or alternatively how the Coulomb blockade is formed. We then consider a wide variaty of other errors, including thermal frequency, leakage and heating errors. We show the dependence of the error rate on each of those mechanisms, and predict maxima or minima for the corresponding parameters. In the conclusion, we discuss the various advantages Si-based turnstiles or pumps would offer with respect to the metal-based ones.

Citation

Journal of Applied Physics

Volume

96

Issue

9

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

change source, error mechanisms, single-electron tunneling, tunable-barriers

Citation

Zimmerman, N. and Hourdakis, E. (2004), Error Mechanisms and Rates in Tunable-Barrier Single-Electron Turnstiles and CCD's, Journal of Applied Physics, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=31579 (Accessed May 5, 2024)