Multiple electron pumping

Abstract

The need to pump single electrons with a high degree of accuracy and fidelity has led to the development of a range of different pump and turnstile designs. Previous pumping mechanisms have all demonstrated that pumping more than one electron per cycle degrades the quantisation of the measured current. This unreliable delivery of multiple electrons per cycle has limited the use of on-demand single electron sources in electron quantum optic experiments. We present highly quantised current with multiple electrons pumped per cycle. We experimentally demonstrate that in our pumps an increase in electron throughput per cycle does not lead to an appreciable degradation in the accuracy of the produced current.

Our pump is realised in an aluminium gallium arsenide two-dimensional electron gas, where electrons are pumped through a one-dimensional split-gate confinement potential under the influence of an applied source-drain voltage \(V_{\text{SD}}\), and where the pump is driven by a trapezoidal arbitrary waveform. This combination of a split-gate potential, \(V_{\text{SD}}\) bias and trapezoidal wave form has led to the observation of robust quantised plateaus where not just a single electron, but a multiple integer number of electrons are pumped per cycle with a high degree of robustness and without the need of a magnetic field. For seven electrons per cycle, we report an increase of over two orders of magnitude in pumping accuracy from \(2.72 \times 10^{-2}\) in devices operating in the conventional pumping regime, to \(1.64 \times 10^{-4}\) in pumps operating in what we call the long plateau regime, a regime accessed under a change in a split-gate pumps applied \(V_{\text{SD}}\) voltage. This pump will find direct use in quantum transport measurements where the metrological accuracy of single electrons pumped per cycle is not required and the low throughput per cycle of electrons is limiting.