No Arabic abstract
We report a study of transport blockade features in a quantum dot single-electron transistor, based on an undoped AlGaAs/GaAs heterostructure. We observe suppression of transport through the ground state of the dot, as well as negative differential conductance at finite source-drain bias. The temperature and magnetic field dependence of these features indicate the couplings between the leads and the quantum dot states are suppressed. We attribute this to two possible mechanisms: spin effects which determine whether a particular charge transition is allowed based on the change in total spin, and the interference effects that arise from coherent tunneling of electrons in the dot.
Radio frequency reflectometry is demonstrated in a sub-micron undoped AlGaAs/GaAs device. Undoped single electron transistors (SETs) are attractive candidates to study single electron phenomena due to their charge stability and robust electronic properties after thermal cycling. However these devices require a large top-gate which is unsuitable for the fast and sensitive radio frequency reflectometry technique. Here we demonstrate rf reflectometry is possible in an undoped SET.
We report quantum dots fabricated on very shallow 2-dimensional electron gases, only 30 nm below the surface, in undoped GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures grown by molecular beam epitaxy. Due to the absence of dopants, an improvement of more than one order of magnitude in mobility (at 2E11 /cm^2) with respect to doped heterostructures with similar depths is observed. These undoped wafers can easily be gated with surface metallic gates patterned by e-beam lithography, as demonstrated here from single-level transport through a quantum dot showing large charging energies (up to 1.75 meV) and excited state energies (up to 0.5 meV).
We study phonon emission in a GaAs/AlGaAs double quantum dot by monitoring the tunneling of a single electron between the two dots. We prepare the system such that a known amount of energy is emitted in the transition process. The energy is converted into lattice vibrations and the resulting tunneling rate depends strongly on the phonon scattering and its effective phonon spectral density. We are able to fit the measured transition rates and see imprints of interference of phonons with themselves causing oscillations in the transition rates.
We study the spin dynamics in a high-mobility two-dimensional electron gas confined in a GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well. An unusual magnetic field dependence of the spin relaxation is found: as the magnetic field becomes stronger, the spin relaxation time first increases quadratically but then changes to a linear dependence, before it eventually becomes oscillatory, whereby the longitudinal and transverse times reach maximal values at even and odd filling Landau level factors, respectively. We show that the suppression of spin relaxation is due to the effect of electron gyration on the spin-orbit field, while the oscillations correspond to oscillations of the density of states appearing at low temperatures and high magnetic fields. The transition from quadratic to linear dependence can be related to a transition from classical to Bohm diffusion and reflects an anomalous behavior of the two-dimensional electron gas analogous to that observed in magnetized plasmas.
We have fabricated AlGaAs/GaAs heterostructure devices in which the conduction channel can be populated with either electrons or holes simply by changing the polarity of a gate bias. The heterostructures are entirely undoped, and carriers are instead induced electrostatically. We use these devices to perform a direct comparison of the scattering mechanisms of two-dimensional (2D) electrons ($mu_textrm{peak}=4times10^6textrm{cm}^2/textrm{Vs}$) and holes ($mu_textrm{peak}=0.8times10^6textrm{cm}^2/textrm{Vs}$) in the same conduction channel with nominally identical disorder potentials. We find significant discrepancies between electron and hole scattering, with the hole mobility being considerably lower than expected from simple theory.