The Impact of Small-Angle Scattering on Ballistic Transport in Quantum Dots

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that removing ionized dopants and electrostatically populating quantum dots significantly improves reproducibility of their electronic properties, highlighting the dominant role of disorder potential in ballistic transport.

Contribution

It introduces a method to reduce disorder effects in quantum dots by electrostatic doping, enhancing device reproducibility and understanding of disorder's impact on electron dynamics.

Findings

Electrostatically populated quantum dots show high reproducibility after thermal cycling.

Disorder potential significantly influences electron dynamics in quantum dots.

Removing ionized dopants improves ballistic transport properties.

Abstract

Disorder increasingly affects performance as electronic devices are reduced in size. The ionized dopants used to populate a device with electrons are particularly problematic, leading to unpredictable changes in the behavior of devices such as quantum dots each time they are cooled for use. We show that a quantum dot can be used as a highly sensitive probe of changes in disorder potential, and that by removing the ionized dopants and populating the dot electrostatically, its electronic properties become reproducible with high fidelity after thermal cycling to room temperature. Our work demonstrates that the disorder potential has a significant, perhaps even dominant, influence on the electron dynamics, with important implications for `ballistic' transport in quantum dots.