Spatially resolved resonant tunneling on single atoms in silicon

Abstract

The ability to control single dopants in solid-state devices has opened the way towards reliable quantum computation schemes. In this perspective it is essential to understand the impact of interfaces and electric fields, inherent to address coherent electronic manipulation, on the dopants atomic scale properties. This requires both fine energetic and spatial resolution of the energy spectrum and wave-function, respectively. Here we present an experiment fulfilling both conditions: we perform transport on single donors in silicon close to a vacuum interface using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) in the single electron tunneling regime. The spatial degrees of freedom of the STM tip provide a versatility allowing a unique understanding of electrostatics. We obtain the absolute energy scale from the thermal broadening of the resonant peaks, allowing to deduce the charging energies of the donors. Finally we use a rate equations model to derive the current in presence of an excited state, highlighting the benefits of the highly tunable vacuum tunnel rates which should be exploited in further experiments. This work provides a general framework to investigate dopant-based systems at the atomic scale.

15 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Solid state quantum memory using the 31P nuclear spin
• Transport spectroscopy of a single dopant in a gated silicon nanowire
• Detection of a large valley-orbit splitting in silicon with two-donor spectroscopy
• Engineered valley-orbit splittings in quantum confined nanostructures in silicon
• Control of the ionization state of 3 single donor atoms in silicon

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Valley interference and spin exchange at the atomic scale in silicon
• Multi-valley envelope function equations and effective potentials for P impurity in silicon
• Quasiparticle excitations in a one-dimensional interacting topological insulator: Application for dopant-based quantum simulation