Single Electron Tunneling Report
Single Electron Tunneling Report
Single Electron Tunneling Report
Introduction:
SET devices can be used to construct circuits which process information by manipulating individual electrons. SET devices are small, dissipate little power, and can detect exquisitely small quantities of charge. The small size and low power dissipation of SET circuits makes them potentially useful for the Information Technology industry. The electromagnetic environment in which a small tunnel junction circuit is embedded plays a crucial role in its transport properties. Although the theory of single-electron tunneling is well established, few analytical results are known.
Equivalent circuit and energy diagram of a single tunnel junction. The resistor Re represents the low-frequency impedance of the environment.
resistor. The resistance depends exponentially on the barrier thickness. Typical barrier thicknesses are on the order of one to several nanometers. Due to the discreteness of electrical charge, current through a tunnel junction is a series of events in which exactly one electron passes (tunnels) through the tunnel barrier (we neglect cotunneling, in which two electrons tunnel simultaneously). The tunnel junction capacitor is charged with one elementary charge by the tunnelling electron, causing a voltage buildup U = e / C, where e is the elementary charge of 1.61019 coulomb and C the capacitance of the junction. If the capacitance is very small, the voltage buildup can be large enough to prevent another electron from tunnelling. The electrical current is then suppressed at low bias voltages and the resistance of the device is no longer constant. The increase of the differential resistance around zero bias is called the Coulomb blockade.
Evolution of the IV characteristic of a single tunnel junction as the resistance of the environment Re is increased
CHARACTERISTIC ENERGIES:
Charging an island with a small number of electrons is associated with two kinds of energies. Electron Electron Interaction Quantum Confinement Energies
Fig: Comparison of the change in Fermi energy for the addition of one, two, and three electrons in Si to the electrostatic charging energy.
Fig: Comparison of the change in Fermi energy for the addition of one electron in Si and Al.
local rule , where only the junction through which the electron tunnels is considered for the calculation of the Coulomb energy. The high impedance kind of shields the rest of the environment from the junction. It is difficult to provide a high impedance environment for a single junction, because stray capacitances which are usually much bigger than the capacitance of the junction itself, cause the junction to be voltage bias.
Two tunnel junctions in series biased with an ideal voltage source. The background charge q0 is noninteger, and n1 and n2 denote the number of tunneled electrons through junction one and junction two, respectively
A double barrier structure attached to source (S) and drain (D). CSD denotes a residual capacitance between the two leads.
A background charge q0 produces generally a non-integer charge offset. The background charge is induced by stray capacitances that are not shown in the circuit diagram and impurities located near the island, which are practically always present. Vb=V1+V2gives
IV-characteristic of a double tunnel junction. The solid line gives the characteristic for q0=0 and the dashed line for q0=0.5e. The Coulomb blockade is a direct result of the additional Coulomb energy, e2/2C, which must be expended by an electron in order to tunnel into or out of the island
Energy diagram of a double tunnel junction without and with applied bias. The Coulomb blockade causes an energy gap where no electrons can tunnel through either junction. A bias larger than e/C overcomes the energy gap.
In the blocking state no accessible energy levels are within tunneling range of the electron (red) on the source contact. All energy levels on the island electrode with lower energies are occupied. When a positive voltage is applied to the gate electrode the energy levels of the island electrode are lowered. The electron (green 1.) can tunnel onto the island (2.), occupying a previously vacant energy level. From there it can tunnel onto the drain electrode (3.) where it inelastically scatters and reaches the drain electrode Fermi level (4.).
Energy levels of source, island and drain (from left to right) in a single electron transistor for both the blocking state (upper part) and the transmitting state (lower part).
We write C as
C=(
This matrix model for double barrier is given by following: ( with C11 = C1S + C1D and CSS = C1S + CSD )
Stability diagram of a single-electron transistor. Within the diamonds, Coulomb blockade is established, while outside, a current flows between source and drain.
The Coulomb gap is given by the onset of the same tunneling events as for the single island studied above. Now, however, the Coulomb gap depends upon the gate voltage. Coulomb blockade is established if all four energy differences are positive. For each n, this condition defines a stable, diamond-shaped region in the (VG,V) plane. These stable regions are known as Coulomb diamonds and line up along the VG-axis.
Via a tunnel junction, island 1 is coupled to source and island 2 to drain. The total capacitances C11 of both islands are assumed to be equal. Furthermore, we neglect several capacitance matrix elements and assume that electrode A (B) couples only to island 1 (2), with equal capacitances.
Quantum Dot:
A quantum dot is a portion of matter (e.g. semiconductor) whose excitations are confined in all three spatial dimensions. Consequently, such materials have electronic properties intermediate between those of bulk semiconductors and those of discrete molecules. Stated simply, quantum dots are semiconductors whose electronic characteristics are closely related to the size and shape of the individual crystal. Generally, the smaller the size of the crystal, the larger the band gap, the greater the difference in energy between the highest valence band and the lowest conduction band becomes, therefore more energy is needed to excite the dot, and concurrently, more energy is released when the crystal returns to its resting state. Besides confinement in all three dimensions i.e. Quantum Dot - other quantum confined semiconductors include:
Quantum wires, which confine electrons or holes in two spatial dimensions and allow free propagation in the third. Quantum wells, which confine electrons or holes in one dimension and allow free propagation in two dimensions.
Schematic diagram of the experimental set-up used to image electrons in a single-electron quantum dot. charged scanning probe microscope (SPM) tip is scanned at a fixed height above the surface of the GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructure containing the dot. Images are obtained by recording the Coulomb blockade conductance G vs. tip position.
Cotunneling:
This effect was first predicted in 1989 and observed experimentally soon after . The essence of the effect is that the tunneling of several (N>1) electrons through different barriers at the same time is possible as a single coherent quantum-mechanical process. The rate of this process is crudely (RQ/R)N-1 times less than that for the single-electron tunneling described by of the orthodox theory. Cotunneling can nevertheless be clearly observed within the Coulomb blockade range where orthodox tunneling is suppressed.
2) The second major problem with single-electron logic circuits is the infamous randomness of the background charge.
Let a single charged impurity be trapped in the insulating environment, say on the substrate surface, at a distance a from the island, comparable to its size. The impurity will polarize the island, creating on its surface an image charge Q0 of the order of e. This charge is effectively subtracted from the external charge Qe which determines the Coulomb blockade thresholds Vt. One of 1,000 devices with 1-nm islands will have a considerable background charge fluctuation (Q0> 0.1 e). Presumably, this is unacceptable for any VLSI application.
d) Other Applications:
1) 2) 3) 4) Background-Charge-Insensitive Memory Crested Tunnel Barriers NOVORAM Electrostatic Data Storage
SET & Logic Gates: SET devices can be used to form number of gates, just like CMOS. Those are given is following-
Conclusion:
Single-electronic devices have already proved their value as tools in scientific research. Several applications of these devices in metrology, including the fundamental standards of current, resistance, and temperature also seem quite promising. Another prospective application field is terahertz radiation detection and (possibly) imaging. The situation with digital single-electronics is much more complex. The concepts of single electron logic circuits suggested so far face tough challenges: either that of removing the random background charge or alternatively that of providing continuous charge transfer in nanoscale resistors. This still leaves us with the most important problem, the fabrication. Despite recent progress in the fabrication of single devices with a-few-nm minimum features, prospects for the fabrication of VLSI circuits with the same resolution are still very distant. Indeed, the methods used in this research field (mostly direct electron-beam writing and scanning probe manipulation) are hardly scalable to wholewafer or even whole-chip level, because of their very low speed. The development of VLSI nanofabrication methods (e.g., multiple-electron-beam writing) will certainly require many years and many billions of dollars.