No Arabic abstract
An ultra-small Coulomb blockade device can be regarded as a mesoscopic artificial atom system and provides a rich experimental environment for studying quantum transport phenomena[1]. Previously, these quantum effects have been investigated using relatively large devices at ultra-low temperatures, where they give rise to a fine additional structure on the Coulomb oscillations [2-13]. Here, we report transport measurements carried out on a sub-2nm single-electron device; this size is sufficiently small that Coulomb blockade, and other quantum effects, persist up to room temperature (RT). These devices were made by scaling the size of a FinFET structure down to an ultimate limiting form, resulting in the reliable formation of a sub-2nm silicon Coulomb island. Four clear Coulomb diamonds can be observed at RT and the 2nd Coulomb diamond is unusually large, due to quantum confinement. The observed characteristics are successfully modeled on the basis of a very low electron number on the island, combined with Pauli spin exclusion. These effects offer additional functionality for future RT-operating single-electron device applications
We analyze the heat current flowing across interacting quantum dots within the Coulomb blockade regime. Power can be generated by either voltage or temperature biases. In the former case, we find nonlinear contributions to the Peltier effect that are dominated by conventional Joule heating for sufficiently high voltages. In the latter case, the differential thermal conductance shows maxima or minima depending on the energy level position. Furthermore, we discuss departures from the Kelvin-Onsager reciprocity relation beyond linear response.
We report measurements of spin transitions for GaAs quantum dots in the Coulomb blockade regime, and compare ground and excited state transport spectroscopy to direct measurements of the spin polarization of emitted current. Transport spectroscopy reveals both spin-increasing and spin-decreasing transitions as well as higher-spin ground states, and allows g-factors to be measured down to a single electron. The spin of emitted current in the Coulomb blockade regime, measured using spin-sensitive electron focusing, is found to be polarized along the direction of the applied magnetic field regardless of the ground state spin transition.
Low-temperature transport properties of a lateral quantum dot formed by overlaying finger gates in a clean one-dimensional channel are investigated. Continuous and periodic oscillations superimposed upon ballistic conductance steps are observed, when the conductance G of the dot changes within a wide range 0<G<6e^2/h. Calculations of the electrostatics confirm that the measured periodic conductance oscillations correspond to successive change of the total charge of the dot by $e$. By modelling the transport it is shown that the progression of the Coulomb oscillations into the region G>2e^2/h may be due to suppression of inter-1D-subband scattering. Fully transmitted subbands contribute to coherent background of conductance, while sequential tunneling via weakly transmitted subbands leads to Coulomb charging of the dot.
We report on depinning of nearly-commensurate charge-density waves in 1T-TaS2 thin-films at room temperature. A combination of the differential current-voltage measurements with the low-frequency noise spectroscopy provide unambiguous means for detecting the depinning threshold field in quasi-2D materials. The depinning process in 1T-TaS2 is not accompanied by an observable abrupt increase in electric current - in striking contrast to depinning in the conventional charge-density-wave materials with quasi-1D crystal structure. We explained it by the fact that the current density from the charge-density waves in the 1T-TaS2 devices is orders of magnitude smaller than the current density of the free carriers available in the discommensuration network surrounding the commensurate charge-density-wave islands. The depinning fields in 1T-TaS2 thin-film devices are several orders of magnitude larger than those in quasi-1D van der Waals materials. Obtained results are important for the proposed applications of the charge-density-wave devices in electronics.
Monolayers of molybdenum and tungsten dichalcogenides are direct bandgap semiconductors, which makes them promising for opto-electronic applications. In particular, van der Waals heterostructures consisting of monolayers of MoS2 sandwiched between atomically thin hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) and graphene electrodes allows one to obtain light emitting quantum wells (LEQWs) with low-temperature external quantum efficiency (EQE) of 1%. However, the EQE of MoS2 and MoSe2-based LEQWs shows behavior common for many other materials: it decreases fast from cryogenic conditions to room temperature, undermining their practical applications. Here we compare MoSe2 and WSe2 LEQWs. We show that the EQE of WSe2 devices grows with temperature, with room temperature EQE reaching 5%, which is 250x more than the previous best performance of MoS2 and MoSe2 quantum wells in ambient conditions. We attribute such a different temperature dependences to the inverted sign of spin-orbit splitting of conduction band states in tungsten and molybdenum dichalcogenides, which makes the lowest-energy exciton in WSe2 dark.