Lifetime enhanced transport in silicon due to spin and valley blockade

Abstract

We report the observation of Lifetime Enhanced Transport (LET) based on perpendicular valleys in silicon by transport spectroscopy measurements of a two-electron system in a silicon transistor. The LET is manifested as a peculiar current step in the stability diagram due to a forbidden transition between an excited state and any of the lower energy states due perpendicular valley (and spin) configurations, offering an additional current path. By employing a detailed temperature dependence study in combination with a rate equation model, we estimate the lifetime of this particular state to exceed 48 ns. The two-electron spin-valley configurations of all relevant confined quantum states in our device were obtained by a large-scale atomistic tight-binding simulation. The LET acts as a signature of the complicated valley physics in silicon; a feature that becomes increasingly important in silicon quantum devices.

4 pages, 4 figures. (The current version (v3) is the result of splitting up the previous version (v2), and has been completely rewritten)

References in corpus (3)

• Transport spectroscopy of a single dopant in a gated silicon nanowire
• Quantum control of donor electrons at the Si-SiO2 interface
• Engineered valley-orbit splittings in quantum confined nanostructures in silicon

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Silicon Quantum Electronics
• Spin-valley lifetimes in a silicon quantum dot with tunable valley splitting
• Universal Quantum Computing with Spin and Valley
• Magnetic Field Probing of an SU(4) Kondo Resonance in a Single Atom Transistor
• Charge Pumping Through a Single Donor Atom
• Two-electron states of a group V donor in silicon from atomistic full configuration interaction
• Probing the Quantum States of a Single Atom Transistor at Microwave Frequencies
• Valley blockade and multielectron spin-valley Kondo effect in silicon
• Voltage controlled exchange energies of a two electron silicon double quantum dot with and without charge defects in the dielectric
• A hybrid double-dot in silicon
• The 30-band k.p modeling of electron and hole states in silicon quantum wells
• Non-local coupling of two donor-bound electrons