On-Demand Coherent Single-Electron Source Fève, G; Mahé, A; Berroir, J.-M ...
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
05/2007, Volume:
316, Issue:
5828
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We report on the electron analog of the single-photon gun. On-demand single-electron injection in a quantum conductor was obtained using a quantum dot connected to the conductor via a tunnel barrier. ...Electron emission was triggered by the application of a potential step that compensated for the dot-charging energy. Depending on the barrier transparency, the quantum emission time ranged from 0.1 to 10 nanoseconds. The single-electron source should prove useful for the use of quantum bits in ballistic conductors. Additionally, periodic sequences of single-electron emission and absorption generate a quantized alternating current.
The on-demand emission of coherent and indistinguishable electrons by independent synchronized sources is a challenging task of quantum electronics, in particular regarding its application for ...quantum information processing. Using two independent on-demand electron sources, we triggered the emission of two single-electron wave packets at different inputs of an electronic beam splitter. Whereas classical particles would be randomly partitioned by the splitter, we observed two-particle interference resulting from quantum exchange. Both electrons, emitted in indistinguishable wave packets with synchronized arrival time on the splitter, exited in different outputs as recorded by the low-frequency current noise. The demonstration of two-electron interference provides the possibility of manipulating coherent and indistinguishable single-electron wave packets in quantum conductors.
Coulomb interaction has a striking effect on electronic propagation in one-dimensional conductors. The interaction of an elementary excitation with neighbouring conductors favours the emergence of ...collective modes, which eventually leads to the destruction of the Landau quasiparticle. In this process, an injected electron tends to fractionalize into separated pulses carrying a fraction of the electron charge. Here we use two-particle interferences in the electronic analogue of the Hong-Ou-Mandel experiment in a quantum Hall conductor at filling factor 2 to probe the fate of a single electron emitted in the outer edge channel and interacting with the inner one. By studying both channels, we analyse the propagation of the single electron and the generation of interaction-induced collective excitations in the inner channel. These complementary pieces of information reveal the fractionalization process in the time domain and establish its relevance for the destruction of the quasiparticle, which degrades into the collective modes.
Carrier mobility in solids is generally limited by electron-impurity or electron-phonon scattering, depending on the most frequently occurring event. Three-body collisions between carriers and both ...phonons and impurities are rare; they are denoted supercollisions. Elusive in electronic transport they should emerge in relaxation processes as they allow for larger energy transfers. This is the case in undoped graphene, where the small Fermi surface drastically restricts the allowed phonon energy in ordinary collisions. Using electrical heating and sensitive noise thermometry we report on supercollision cooling in diffusive monolayer graphene. At low carrier density and high phonon temperature the Joule power P obeys a P Te3 law as a function of electronic temperature Te. It overrules the linear law expected for ordinary collisions which has recently been observed in resistivity measurements. The cubic law is characteristic of supercollisions and departs from the Te4 dependence recently reported for doped graphene below the Bloch-Grüneisen temperature. These supercollisions are important for applications of graphene in bolometry and photo-detection. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
In quantum nanoelectronics, time-dependent electrical currents are built from few elementary excitations emitted with well-defined wavefunctions. However, despite the realization of sources ...generating quantized numbers of excitations, and despite the development of the theoretical framework of time-dependent quantum electronics, extracting electron and hole wavefunctions from electrical currents has so far remained out of reach, both at the theoretical and experimental levels. In this work, we demonstrate a quantum tomography protocol which extracts the generated electron and hole wavefunctions and their emission probabilities from any electrical current. It combines two-particle interferometry with signal processing. Using our technique, we extract the wavefunctions generated by trains of Lorentzian pulses carrying one or two electrons. By demonstrating the synthesis and complete characterization of electronic wavefunctions in conductors, this work offers perspectives for quantum information processing with electrical currents and for investigating basic quantum physics in many-body systems.
We have realized a quantum optics like Hanbury Brown-Twiss (HBT) experiment by partitioning, on an electronic beam splitter, single elementary electronic excitations produced one by one by an ...on-demand emitter. We show that the measurement of the output currents correlations in the HBT geometry provides a direct counting, at the single charge level, of the elementary excitations (electron-hole pairs) generated by the emitter at each cycle. We observe the antibunching of low energy excitations emitted by the source with thermal excitations of the Fermi sea already present in the input leads of the splitter, which suppresses their contribution to the partition noise. This effect is used to probe the energy distribution of the emitted wave packets.
Coulomb interactions have a major role in one-dimensional electronic transport. They modify the nature of the elementary excitations from Landau quasiparticles in higher dimensions to collective ...excitations in one dimension. Here we report the direct observation of the collective neutral and charge modes of the two chiral co-propagating edge channels of opposite spins of the quantum Hall effect at filling factor 2. Generating a charge density wave at frequency f in the outer channel, we measure the current induced by inter-channel Coulomb interaction in the inner channel after a 3-μm propagation length. Varying the driving frequency from 0.7 to 11 GHz, we observe damped oscillations in the induced current that result from the phase shift between the fast charge and slow neutral eigenmodes. We measure the dispersion relation and dissipation of the neutral mode from which we deduce quantitative information on the interaction range and parameters.
Graphene/hBN heterostructures are promising active materials for devices in the THz domain, such as emitters and photodetectors based on interband transitions. Their performance requires long carrier ...lifetimes. However, carrier recombination processes in graphene possess sub-picosecond characteristic times for large non-equilibrium carrier densities at high energy. An additional channel has been recently demonstrated in graphene/hBN heterostructures by emission of hBN hyperbolic phonon polaritons (HPhP) with picosecond decay time. Here, we report on carrier lifetimes in graphene/hBN Zener-Klein transistors of ~30 ps for photoexcited carriers at low density and energy, using mid-infrared photoconductivity measurements. We further demonstrate the switching of carrier lifetime from ~30 ps (attributed to interband Auger) down to a few picoseconds upon ignition of HPhP relaxation at finite bias and/or with infrared excitation power. Our study opens interesting perspectives to exploit graphene/hBN heterostructures for THz lasing and highly sensitive THz photodetection as well as for phonon polariton optics.
We have investigated the energy loss of hot electrons in metallic graphene by means of GHz noise thermometry at liquid helium temperature. We observe the electronic temperature T ∝ V at low bias in ...agreement with the heat diffusion to the leads described by the Wiedemann-Franz law. We report on T ∝ √V behavior at high bias, which corresponds to a T(4) dependence of the cooling power. This is the signature of a 2D acoustic phonon cooling mechanism. From a heat equation analysis of the two regimes we extract accurate values of the electron-acoustic phonon coupling constant Σ in monolayer graphene. Our measurements point to an important effect of lattice disorder in the reduction of Σ, not yet considered by theory. Moreover, our study provides a strong and firm support to the rising field of graphene bolometric detectors.
PDF
