No Arabic abstract
Starting from the Kubo formula for conductance, we calculate the frequency-dependent response of a single-electron transistor (SET) driven by an ac signal. Treating tunneling processes within the lowest order approximation, valid for a wide range of parameters, we discover a finite reactive part even under Coulomb blockade due to virtual processes. At low frequencies this can be described by an effective capacitance. This effect can be probed with microwave reflection measurements in radio-frequency (rf) SET provided that the capacitance of the surroundings does not completely mask that of the SET.
We have directly measured the quantum noise of a superconducting single-electron transistor (S-SET) embedded in a microwave resonator consisting of a superconducting LC tank circuit. Using an effective bath description, we find that the S-SET provides damping of the resonator modes proportional to its differential conductance and has an effective temperature that depends strongly on the S-SET bias conditions. In the vicinity of a double Cooper pair resonance, when both resonances are red detuned the S-SET effective temperature can be well below both the ambient temperature and the energy scale of the bias voltage. When blue detuned, the S-SET shows negative differential conductivity,
Single dopants in semiconductor nanostructures have been studied in great details recently as they are good candidates for quantum bits, provided they are coupled to a detector. Here we report coupling of a single As donor atom to a single-electron transistor (SET) in a silicon nanowire field-effect transistor. Both capacitive and tunnel coupling are achieved, the latter resulting in a dramatic increase of the conductance through the SET, by up to one order of magnitude. The experimental results are well explained by the rate equations theory developed in parallel with the experiment.
We perform direct thermovoltage measurements in a single-electron transistor, using on-chip local thermometers, both in the linear and non-linear regimes. Using a model which accounts for co-tunneling, we find excellent agreement with the experimental data with no free parameters even when the temperature difference is larger than the average temperature (far-from-linear regime). This allows us to confirm the sensitivity of the thermovoltage on co-tunneling and to find that in the non-linear regime the temperature of the metallic island is a crucial parameter. Surprisingly, the metallic island tends to overheat even at zero net charge current, resulting in a reduction of the thermovoltage.
We report on combined measurements of heat and charge transport through a single-electron transistor. The device acts as a heat switch actuated by the voltage applied on the gate. The Wiedemann-Franz law for the ratio of heat and charge conductances is found to be systematically violated away from the charge degeneracy points. The observed deviation agrees well with the theoretical expectation. With large temperature drop between the source and drain, the heat current away from degeneracy deviates from the standard quadratic dependence in the two temperatures.
We present a linear-response theory for the thermopower of a single-electron transistor consisting of a superconducting island weakly coupled to two normal-conducting leads (NSN SET). The thermopower shows oscillations with the same periodicity as the conductance and is rather sensitive to the size of the superconducting gap. In particular, the previously studied sawtooth-like shape of the thermopower for a normal-conducting single-electron device is qualitatively changed even for small gap energies.