Strain enhanced electron cooling in a degenerately doped semiconductor

Prest, M. J.; Muhonen, Juha T.; Prunnila, Mika; Gunnarsson, David; Shah, V. A.; Richardson-Bullock, J. S.; Dobbie, A.; Myronov, Maksym; Morris, R. J. H.; Whall, T. E.; Parker, E. H. C.; Leadley, D. R.

doi:10.1063/1.3670330

Cited by 17 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…The use of strained silicon reduces the constant R by a factor of 25 compared to unstrained silicon, 19 this results in a corresponding improvement in the second term of Eq. (5) (the phonon noise).…”

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A strained silicon cold electron bolometer using Schottky contacts

Brien

Barry

Dunscombe

et al. 2014

Applied Physics Letters

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We describe optical characterisation of a Strained Silicon Cold Electron Bolometer (CEB), operating on a 350 mK stage, designed for absorption of millimetre-wave radiation. The silicon Cold Electron Bolometer utilises Schottky contacts between a superconductor and an n ++ doped silicon island to detect changes in the temperature of the charge carriers in the silicon, due to variations in absorbed radiation. By using strained silicon as the absorber, we decrease the electron-phonon coupling in the device and increase the responsivity to incoming power. The strained silicon absorber is coupled to a planar aluminium twin-slot antenna designed to couple to 160 GHz and that serves as the superconducting contacts. From the measured optical responsivity and spectral response, we calculate a maximum optical efficiency of 50 % for radiation coupled into the device by the planar antenna and an overall noise equivalent power (NEP), referred to absorbed optical power, of 1.1 × 10 −16 W Hz −1 /2 when the detector is observing a 300 K source through a 4 K throughput limiting aperture. Even though this optical system is not optimised we measure a system noise equivalent temperature difference (NETD) of 6 mK Hz −1 /2 . We measure the noise of the device using a cross-correlation of time stream data measured simultaneously with two junction field-effect transistor (JFET) amplifiers, with a base correlated noise level of 300 pV Hz −1 /2 and find that the total noise is consistent with a combination of photon noise, current shot noise and electron-phonon thermal noise.

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“…where R is a material constant that has been measured 19 to be 2 Â 10 7 W K -6 m -3 ; X is the volume of the bolometer's absorber; T ph and T e are the phonon and electron temperatures, respectively, and the power b has been found 19 to be 6. From this, we can define a thermal conductance, G, from the phonons to the electrons as…”

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A strained silicon cold electron bolometer using Schottky contacts

Brien

Barry

Dunscombe

et al. 2014

Applied Physics Letters

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“…It has been shown that introducing strain into the silicon lattice can further reduce this coupling, allowing microrefrigerator-type devices to achieve lower electron temperatures compared to unstrained-silicon [4].…”

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Optical Response of Strained- and Unstrained-Silicon Cold-Electron Bolometers

et al. 2016

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We describe the optical characterisation of two silicon cold-electron bolometers each consisting of a small (32 × 14 µm) island of degenerately doped silicon with superconducting aluminium contacts. Radiation is coupled into the silicon absorber with a twin-slot antenna designed to couple to 160-GHz radiation through a silicon lens. The first device has a highly doped silicon absorber, the second has a highly doped strained-silicon absorber. Using a novel method of cross-correlating the outputs from two parallel amplifiers, we measure noise-equivalent powers of 3.0 × 10 −16 and 6.6×10 −17 W Hz −1/2 for the control and strained device, respectively, when observing radiation from a 77-K source. In the case of the strained device, the noise-equivalent power is limited by the photon noise.

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“…7 Metal-semiconductor tunnel junctions have been utilized in low-temperature microcoolers for effective electronic cooling down to 40 mK through hot quasiparticle tunneling. [8][9][10][11] So far, there have been no attempts to extend use of Schottky junctions to other types of low temperature tunneling devices. In the present Letter, we report on a CBT sensor with Schottky barrier tunnel junctions fabricated on a heavily doped silicon-on-insulator (SOI) film.…”

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“…10,17,18 Weak electron-phonon coupling due to the strong temperature dependence in Eq. (6) is very well known to be the bottleneck in the heat transfer below 1 K that effectively precludes electrons from reaching full thermal equilibrium with phonons, especially in the millikelvin range.…”

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Silicon-based Coulomb blockade thermometer with Schottky barriers

Tuboltsev

Savin

Rogozin

et al. 2014

Applied Physics Letters

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A hybrid Coulomb blockade thermometer (CBT) in form of an array of intermittent aluminum and silicon islands connected in series via tunnel junctions was fabricated on a thin silicon-on-insulator (SOI) film. Tunnel barriers in the micrometer size junctions were formed by metal-semiconductor Schottky contacts between aluminium electrodes and heavily doped silicon. Differential conductance through the array vs. bias voltage was found to exhibit characteristic features of competing thermal and charging effects enabling absolute temperature measurements over the range of ∼65 to ∼500 mK. The CBT performance implying the primary nature of the thermometer demonstrated for rather trivial architecture attempted in this work paves a route for introduction of Coulomb blockade thermometry into well-developed contemporary SOI technology.

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Strain enhanced electron cooling in a degenerately doped semiconductor

Cited by 17 publications

References 15 publications

A strained silicon cold electron bolometer using Schottky contacts

A strained silicon cold electron bolometer using Schottky contacts

Optical Response of Strained- and Unstrained-Silicon Cold-Electron Bolometers

Silicon-based Coulomb blockade thermometer with Schottky barriers

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