No Arabic abstract
Molecular beam epitaxy is employed to manufacture self-assembled InAs/AlAs quantum-dot resonant tunneling diodes. Resonant tunneling current is superimposed on the thermal current, and they make up the total electron transport in devices. Steps in current-voltage characteristics and peaks in capacitance-voltage characteristics are explained as electron resonant tunneling via quantum dots at 77K or 300K, and this is the first time that resonant tunneling is observed at room temperature in III-V quantum-dot materials. Hysteresis loops in the curves are attributed to hot electron injection/emission process of quantum dots, which indicates the concomitant charging/discharging effect.
Molecular beam epitaxy is employed to manufacture self-assembled InAs/GaAs quantum dot Schottky resonant tunneling diodes. By virtue of a thin AlAs insertion barrier, the thermal current is effectively reduced and electron resonant tunneling through quantum dots under both forward and reverse biased conditions is observed at relatively high temperature of 77K. The ground states of quantum dots are found to be at ~0.19eV below the conduction band of GaAs matrix. The theoretical computations are in conformity with experimental data.
We investigated the size dependence of the ground state energy in self-assembled InAs quantum dots embedded in resonant tunneling diodes. Individual current steps observed in the current-voltage characteristics are attributed to resonant single-electron tunneling via the ground state of individual InAs quantum dots. The onset voltage of the first step observed is shown to decrease systematically from 200 mV to 0 with increasing InAs coverage. We relate this to a coverage-dependent size of InAs dots grown on AlAs. The results are confirmed by atomic force micrographs and photoluminescence experiments on reference samples.
We have fabricated superconductor-quantum dot-superconductor (SC-QD-SC) junctions by using SC aluminum electrodes with narrow gaps laterally contacting a single self-assembled InAs QD. The fabricated junctions exhibited clear Coulomb staircases and Coulomb oscillations at 40 mK. Furthermore, clear suppression in conductance was observed for the source-drain voltage $|V_{rm SD}| < 2Delta/e$, where $Delta$ is the SC energy gap of Al. The absence of Josephson current that flows through QDs is due to the strong Coulomb interaction and non-negligible thermal fluctuation in our measurement system.
With the aim of improving solar cell efficiency, a structure for realizing electron tunneling from In0.6Al0.4As quantum dots (QDs) through an Al0.4Ga0.6As barrier to AlAs has been grown using molecular beam epitaxy. The photoluminescence decay time decreased from 1.1 ns to 390 ps as the barrier thickness decreased from 4 to 2 nm, which indicates that the photo-excited carriers tunneled from the QDs to the AlAs X energy level for a barrier thickness 2 nm in 0.6 ns, which is significantly longer than the tunneling time of GaAs and InAlAs quantum wells. We expect that this structure will assist in developing high-efficiency QD sensitized solar cells.
We report measurements of the nonlinear conductance of InAs nanowire quantum dots coupled to superconducting leads. We observe a clear alternation between odd and even occupation of the dot, with sub-gap-peaks at $|V_{sd}|=Delta/e$ markedly stronger(weaker) than the quasiparticle tunneling peaks at $|V_{sd}|=2Delta/e$ for odd(even) occupation. We attribute the enhanced $Delta$-peak to an interplay between Kondo-correlations and Andreev tunneling in dots with an odd number of spins, and substantiate this interpretation by a poor mans scaling analysis.