The goal of this paper is to review in brief the basic physics of single-election devices, as well as their-current and prospective applications. These devices based on the controllable transfer of single electrons between small conducting "islands", have already enabled several important scientific experiments. Several other applications of analog single-election devices in unique scientific instrumentation and metrology seem quite feasible. On the other hand, the prospect of silicon transistors being replaced by single-electron devices in integrated digital circuits faces tough challenges and remains uncertain. Nevertheless, even if this replacement does not happen, single electronics will continue to play an important role by shedding light on the fundamental size limitations of new electronic devices. Moreover, recent research in this field has generated some by-product ideas which may revolutionize random-access-memory and digital-data-storage technologies.

Single-electron devices and their applications

The ongoing miniaturization of solid state devices often leads to the question: “How small can we make resistors, transistors, etc., without changing the way they work?” The question can be asked a different way, however: “How small do we have to make devices in order to get fundamentally new properties?” By “new properties” we particularly mean those that arise from quantum mechanics or the quantization of charge in units of eeffects that are only important in small systems such as atoms. “What kind of small electronic devices do we have in mind?” Any sort of clustering of atoms that can be connected to source and drain contacts and whose properties can be regulated with a gate electrode. Practically, the clustering of atoms may be a molecule, a small grain of metallic atoms, or an electronic device that is made with modern chip fabrication techniques. It turns out that such seemingly different structures have quite similar transport properties and that one can explain their physics within one relatively simple framework. In this paper we investigate the physics of electron transport through such small systems.

Electron Transport in Quantum Dots

The control electrons at the level of the elementary charge e was demonstrated experimentally already in the 1980s. Ever since, the production of an electrical current ef, or its integer multiple, at a drive frequency f has been in a focus of research for metrological purposes.This review discusses the generic physical phenomena and technical constraints that influence single-electron charge transport and presents a broad variety of proposed realizations. Some of them have already proven experimentally to nearly fulfill the demanding needs, in terms of transfer errors and transfer rate, of quantum metrology of electrical quantities, whereas some others are currently ‘‘just’’ wild ideas, still often potentially competitive if technical constraints can be lifted. The important issues of readout of singleelectron events and potential error correction schemes based on them are also discussed. Finally, an account is given of the status of single-electron current sources in the bigger framework of electric quantum standards and of the future international SI system of units, and applications and uses of single-electron devices outside the metrological context are briefly discussed.

/pdf/single-electron-current-sources-toward-a-refined-definition-5atnvohwg2.pdf

Single-electron current sources: Toward a refined definition of the ampere

We report on conductance measurements in carbon nanotube based double quantum dots connected to two normal electrodes and a central superconducting finger. By operating our devices as beam splitters, we provide evidence for crossed Andreev reflections tunable in situ. This opens an avenue to more sophisticated quantum opticslike experiments with spin entangled electrons.

https://physics.aps.org/featured-article-pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.026801

Carbon nanotubes as Cooper pair beam splitters

We report transport measurements on a semiconductor quantum dot with a small number of confined electrons. In the Coulomb blockade regime, conduction is dominated by cotunneling processes. These can be either elastic or inelastic, depending on whether they leave the dot in its ground state or drive it into an excited state, respectively. We are able to discriminate between these two contributions and show that inelastic events can occur only if the applied bias exceeds the lowest excitation energy. Implications to energy-level spectroscopy are discussed.

/pdf/electron-cotunneling-in-a-semiconductor-quantum-dot-4c51n6uvyu.pdf

Electron cotunneling in a semiconductor quantum dot.

The conductance of linear arrays of two and three normal-metal small tunnel junctions is studied for bias voltages V below the Coulomb-blockade threshold. At low temperature, we find evidence for macroscopic quantum tunneling of the electric charge (q-MQT) through the Coulomb energy barrier. For double junctions the tunneling rate scales as V 3 , and approximately as the product of the junction conductances, as predicted by the theory of inelastic q-MQT

/pdf/observation-of-macroscopic-quantum-tunneling-through-the-228av4tnmh.pdf

D.V. Averin

Papers

Observation of macroscopic quantum tunneling through the Coulomb energy barrier.