Coulomb-blockade-controlled single-electron point source

Abstract

Coulomb blockade is a fundamental phenomenon in physics enabling transfer of individual electrons one by one into electrically isolated nanostructures such as nanowires or quantum dots and thereby creation of sources of single electrons. Nowadays, solid-state single-electron sources are key elements of the emerging new technologies of quantum information processing and single-electron electronics. Moreover, advanced research in free-electron quantum optics and developments in electron microscopy require the point sources of free electrons in vacuum, which can be controlled on a single electron level. However, up to now, single-electron vacuum guns were not realized in practice. The problems to be solved include the formation of stable tip-shaped heterostructured emitters and control of liberated electrons in time and energy domain. Here we overcome these challenges by creating a field emission (FE) electron source based on a carbon nanowire coupled to an ultra-sharp diamond tip by a tunnel junction. Using energy spectroscopy, we directly observe Coulomb oscillations of the electron Fermi level in the nanowire at room temperature and FE currents up to 1 $μ$A. We reveal that the oscillations are suppressed at high FE current either by Joule heating or due to the high tunneling resistance, depending on the nanowire charging time, ranging from about 25 fs to 1 ps. We anticipate that the combination of introduced carbon single-electron sources with laser-induced gating is highly promising for the creation of coherent ultrashort free-electron bunches of interest for low-energy electron holography and ultrafast electron or X-ray imaging and spectroscopy.