We report electronic transport experiments on a graphene single electron transistor. The device consists of a graphene island connected to source and drain electrodes via two narrow graphene constrictions. It is electrostatically tunable by three lateral graphene gates and an additional back gate. The tunneling coupling is a strongly nonmonotonic function of gate voltage indicating the presence of localized states in the barriers. We investigate energy scales for the tunneling gap, the resonances in the constrictions and for the Coulomb blockade resonances. From Coulomb diamond measurements in different device configurations (i.e. barrier configurations) we extract a charging energy of 3.4 meV and estimate a characteristic energy scale for the constriction resonances of 10 meV.
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.
A new method to fabricate non-superconducting mesoscopic tunnel junctions by oxidation of Ti is presented. The fabrication process uses conventional electron beam lithography and shadow deposition through an organic resist mask. Superconductivity in Ti is suppressed by performing the deposition under a suitable background pressure. We demonstrate the method by making a single electron transistor which operated at $T < 0.4$ K and had a moderate charge noise of $2.5 times 10^{-3}$ e/$sqrt{mathrm{Hz}}$ at 10 Hz. Based on nonlinearities in the current-voltage characteristics at higher voltages, we deduce the oxide barrier height of approximately 110 mV.
We investigate qubit measurements using a single electron transistor (SET). Applying the Schrodinger equation to the entire system we find that an asymmetric SET is considerably more efficient than a symmetric SET. The asymmetric SET becomes close to an ideal detector in the large asymmetry limit. We also compared the SET detector with a point-contact detector. This comparison allows us to illuminate the relation between information gain in the measurement process and the decoherence generated by these measurement devices.
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 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.