A new concept for the design and realization of metal based single electron devices: Step edge cut-off

Abstract

To increase the operating temperature of a single electron circuit, it is necessary to reduce the capacitance of the tunnel junction. Usually this is done by reducing the linewidth of the capacitor forming metal stripes, which are sandwiched with an intermediate insulator. The use of alternative materials, however, allows capacitance reduction by means of thicker isolation layers or by a capacitor geometry different from a sandwich. The new SECO (step edge cut off) method, for the fabrication of single electron devices will be presented.

Characterization of all-chromium tunnel junctions and single-electron tunneling devices fabricated by direct-writing multilayer technique

“…21,22,32 In two of those works attempts are made to characterize the tunnel properties of Cr/CrO x /Cr junctions, but the CrO x barrier formation was achieved by in situ oxidation 21 or direct CrO x evaporation, 22 which is quite different from our process in which the barrier was formed in air under ambient conditions. In both cases, the junctions were characterized by fitting of the Simmons model for the tunneling current to the measured current-voltage characteristics (IVCs).…”

“…Therefore, the development and improvement of EBL techniques is very important for the future development of SET applications. Diverse fabrication techniques based on EBL have been established, 9,10 but the EBL variants based on the shadow evaporation method still represent the world-wide standard for the fabrication of SET circuits. This method allows the in situ fabrication of small, high-quality tunnel junctions using only one resist mask.…”

The defining length scales of mesomagnetism: a review

“…If such a metallic island (or a series of such islands) is sandwiched between two physically close metallic electrodes (the source and the drain), we have a device which, in principle, is capable of handling one electron charge at a time [281][282][283]. In practice, the self-capacitance of the metal island is negligible compared to its capacitive coupling to the adjacent electrodes and this latter defines the island capacitance for practical purposes.…”

Coulomb blockade phenomena in ultrathin Langmuir-Blodgett sandwich junctions

“…As a representative example, Hirose et al determined the energy barrier between E F of gold and the LUMO of PTCDA, the parent compound of PTCDI-SC5, to be about 0.5 eV [40]. On the other hand, the barrier height for Al/Al 2 O 3 is considerably larger, i.e., in the range of 2.0-2.5 eV [41].…”