Nanowires

CNT NW (Nanowires)

For the tunnel junction direction of current flow is determined by the polarity of the bias.

A tunnel junction is a thin insulating barrier between two conducting electrodes. When a bias voltage is applied there is a flow of current and this tunneling current will be proportional to the bias voltage.

In electrical terms, the tunnel junction behaves as a resistor with a constant resistance (ohmic resistor). The resistance depends exponentially on the barrier thickness. Typical barrier thicknesses are on the order of one to several nanometers. The insulating barrier will also have a dielectric constant so the tunnel junction also behaves as a capacitor.

Electrical charge is discreet so the current through a tunnel junction is a series of events in which exactly one electron tunnels through the tunnel barrier. The tunnel junction capacitor is charged with one elementary charge by the tunneling electron, causing a voltage buildup V = e / C, Where, e = 1.61019 C C the capacitance of the junction. If the capacitance is very small, the voltage buildup can be large enough to prevent another electron from tunneling. The electrical current is then suppressed at low bias voltages and the resistance of the device is no longer constant. The increase of the differential resistance around zero bias is called the Coulomb blockade.

Coulomb blockade: is the increased resistance at small bias voltages of an electronic device comprising at least one low-capacitance tunnel junction.

In order for the Coulomb blockade to be observable, the temperature has to be low enough so that the characteristic charging energy (the energy that is required to charge the junction/capacitor with one elementary charge, Wc = e2/2C) is larger than the thermal energy of the charge carriers. Condition for Coulomb blockade: The charging energy should be greater than the thermal energy

For an island C = 4pee0r r: radius of the island

For capacitances above 1 X1015 F, the temperature has to be below about 1 K.

Another problem for the observation of the Coulomb blockade is the relatively large capacitance of the leads that connect the tunnel junction to the measurement electronics.

If the island size is reduced below ~10 nm, Wa approaches 100 meV, single-electron effects become visible at room temperature. But, most suggested digital single-electron devices require even higher values of Wa (~ 100 kBT) in order to avoid thermally-induced random tunneling events, so that for room temperature operation the electron addition energy has to be as large as a few electron-volts, and the minimum feature size of single-electron devices has to be smaller than ~1 nm. In this size range the electron quantization energy Ek becomes comparable with or larger than the charging energy for most materials; this is why islands this small are frequently called quantum dots.

Arrangement of an experiment to measure the Coulomb blockade. Two electrodes are supported on an insulating substrate separated by a small gap containing a conducting island of nm to hundreds of nm size.

The condition for the Coulomb blockade to occur is that the tunneling rate between the dot and the other electrodes must be sufficiently small.
The electron hopping process is very sensitive to the potential of the center island because the charging energy of a small particle, even for one electron, can be quite significant. If the charging energy is greater than the thermally available energy, further hopping is inhibited, leading to a region of suppressed current in the current voltage characteristic. Once the applied bias exceeds this Coulomb blockade barrier current can flow again. When the potential is increased to the point that the particle becomes charged with two electrons, a second blockade occurs. This process is repeated for each integer (number of electrons) occupation of the particle and the resulting series of steps in the currentvoltage characteristic is called a Coulomb staircase.

Q0 represents the residual floating charge on the island.

We have treated charging of the central particle classically, requiring only that the electronic charge itself be quantized.

But the electron can become delocalized, as in the case of atomic bonds, or band structure in semiconductors and metals. Thus, the condition for Coulomb blockading is that the electron localize on the quantum dot.
The requirement for this to happen is that the tunneling resistance of the contacts exceed h/e2 (2Ro).

The requirement for resonant tunneling to hold is that the conductance between any one electrode and the central state must be equal to or greater than half the Landauer conductance. Thus, a metallic point contact is required between the left and right electrodes and the center localized state for resonant tunneling to occur.

So, a strong coupling between electrodes and a central particle can lead to resonant tunneling if the particle has a state at the Fermi energy, but that the process becomes more like the Coulomb blockade as the coupling between the electrodes and the central particle is made weaker.