title: Single-electron tunneling through an individual arsenic dopant in silicon.
abstract: We report the single-electron tunneling behaviour of a silicon nanobridge where the effective island is a single As dopant atom. The device is a gated silicon nanobridge with a thickness and width of ∼20 nm, fabricated from a commercially available silicon-on-insulator wafer, which was first doped with As atoms and then patterned using a unique CMOS-compatible technique. Transport measurements reveal characteristic Coulomb diamonds whose size decreases with gate voltage. Such a dependence indicates that the island of the single-electron transistor created is an individual arsenic dopant atom embedded in the silicon lattice between the source and drain electrodes, and furthermore, can be explained by the increase of the localisation region of the electron wavefunction when the higher energy levels of the dopant As atom become occupied. The charge stability diagram of the device shows features which can be attributed to adjacent dopants, localised in the nanobridge, acting as charge traps. From the measured device transport, we have evaluated the tunnel barrier properties and obtained characteristic device capacitances. The fabrication, control and understanding of such "single-atom" devices marks a further step towards the implementation of single-atom electronics.
authors.affiliation: M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow 119991, Russia.
authors.forename: V V
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0079-5328
authors.initials: VV
authors.lastname: Shorokhov
authors.affiliation: M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow 119991, Russia.
authors.forename: D E
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9213-0165
authors.initials: DE
authors.lastname: Presnov
authors.affiliation: M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow 119991, Russia.
authors.forename: S V
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3562-8426
authors.initials: SV
authors.lastname: Amitonov
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YB, UK. y.pashkin@lancaster.ac.uk and Lebedev Physical Institute, Moscow 119991, Russia.
authors.forename: Yu A
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4767-8217
authors.initials: YA
authors.lastname: Pashkin
authors.affiliation: M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow 119991, Russia.
authors.forename: V A
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0606-9060
authors.initials: VA
authors.lastname: Krupenin