Statistical study and parallelisation of multiplexed single-electron sources

TL;DR

This paper investigates the statistical behavior and parallelization of multiplexed single-electron sources to increase electric current, demonstrating the feasibility of using a common gate for multiple devices and experimentally achieving a threefold current increase.

Contribution

It provides a statistical analysis of operation gate voltages and experimentally demonstrates parallelization of three single-electron sources using a multiplexer circuit.

Findings

Successful measurement of 64 sources individually in one cooldown.

Parallelization of three sources increases current by a factor of three.

Operation gate voltage statistics support common gate operation for multiple sources.

Abstract

Increasing electric current from a single-electron source is a main challenge in an effort to establish the standard of the ampere defined by the fixed value of the elementary charge $e$ and operation frequency $f$. While the current scales with $f$, due to an operation frequency limit for maintaining accurate single-electron transfer, parallelisation of singleelectron sources is expected to be a more practical solution to increase the generated electric current $I = Nef$, where $N$ is a number of parallelised devices. One way to parallelise single-electron sources without increasing the complexity in device operation is to use a common gate. Such a scheme will require each device to have the same operation parameters for single-electron transfer. In order to investigate this possibility, we study the statistics for operation gate voltages using single-electron sources embedded in a multiplexer circuit. The multiplexer circuit allows us to measure 64 single-electron sources individually in a single cooldown. We also demonstrate the parallelisation of three single-electron sources and observe the generated current enhanced by a factor of three.