No Arabic abstract
We fabricated strongly confined Schottky-gated quantum point contacts by etching Si/SiGe heterostructures and observed intriguing conductance quantization in units of approximately 1e2/h. Non-linear conductance measurements were performed depleting the quantum point contacts at fixed mode-energy separation. We report evidences of the formation of a half 1e2/h plateau, supporting the speculation that adiabatic transmission occurs through 1D modes with complete removal of valley and spin degeneracies.
We report on the fabrication and electronic transport characterisation of Schottky-gated strongly confined Si/SiGe quantum point contacts (QPC). At zero magnetic field and T=450mK the QPC conductance as a function of gate voltage shows a quantization in units of e^2/h, indicative of transport through 1D modes which appear to lack both spin and valley degeneracy.
We report on the effects of a global top gate on low-frequency noise in Schottky gate-defined quantum point contacts (QPCs) and quantum dots (QDs) in a modulation-doped Si/SiGe heterostructure. For a relatively large top gate voltage, the QPC current shows frequent switching with 1/f2 Lorentzian type charge noise. As the top gate voltage is decreased, the QPC pinch-off voltage becomes less negative, and the 1/f2 noise becomes rapidly suppressed in a homogeneous background 1/f noise. We apply this top-gating technique to double QDs to stabilize the charge state for the electron number down to zero.
We study quantum point contacts in two-dimensional topological insulators by means of quantum transport simulations for InAs/GaSb heterostructures and HgTe/(Hg,Cd)Te quantum wells. In InAs/GaSb, the density of edge states shows an oscillatory decay as a function of the distance to the edge. This is in contrast to the behavior of the edge states in HgTe quantum wells, which decay into the bulk in a simple exponential manner. The difference between the two materials is brought about by spatial separation of electrons and holes in InAs/GaSb, which affects the magnitudes of the parameters describing the particle-hole asymmetry and the strength of intersubband coupling within the Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang model. We show that the character of the wave function decay impacts directly the dependence of the point contact conductance on the constriction width and the Fermi energy, which can be verified experimentally and serve to determine accurately the values of relevant parameters. In the case of InAs/GaSb heterostructures the conductance magnitude oscillates as a function of the constriction width following the oscillations of the edge state penetration, whereas in HgTe/(Hg,Cd)Te quantum wells a single switching from transmitting to reflecting contact is predicted.
Due to a strong spin-orbit interaction and a large Lande g-factor, InSb plays an important role in research on Majorana fermions. To further explore novel properties of Majorana fermions, hybrid devices based on quantum wells are conceived as an alternative approach to nanowires. In this work, we report a pronounced conductance quantization of quantum point contact devices in InSb/InAlSb quantum wells. Using a rotating magnetic field, we observe a large in-plane (|g1|=26) and out-of-plane (|g1|=52) g-factor anisotropy. Additionally, we investigate crossings of subbands with opposite spins and extract the electron effective mass from magnetic depopulation of one-dimensional subbands.
We present a calculation of the wavevector-dependent subband level splitting from spin-orbit coupling in Si/SiGe quantum wells. We first use the effective-mass approach, where the splittings are parameterized by separating contributions from the Rashba and Dresselhaus terms. We then determine the parameters by fitting tight-binding numerical results obtained using the quantitative nanoelectronic modeling tool, NEMO-3D. We describe the relevant parameters as a function of applied electric field and well width in our numerical simulations. For a silicon membrane, we find the bulk Rashba parameter to be linear in field, $alpha = alpha^1E_z$ with $alpha^1 simeq 2times$ 10 $^{-5}$nm$^{-2}$. The dominant contribution to the spin-orbit splitting is from Dresselhaus-type terms, and the magnitude for a typical flat SiGe/Si/SiGe quantum well can be as high as 1$mu$eV.