Single-atom transistor discovered

Researchers from Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), University of New South Wales (Australia), and University of Melbourne (Australia) have succeeded in building a working transistor, whose active region composes only of a single phosphorus atom in silicon. The results have just been published in Nano Letters.

The working principles of the device are based on sequential tunneling of single electrons between the phosphorus atom and the source and drain leads of the transistor. The tunneling can be suppressed or allowed by controlling the voltage on a nearby metal electrode with a width of a few tens of nanometers.

Original research article has been published in Nano Letters on Dec. 1st, 2009:
Transport Spectroscopy of Single Phosphorus Donors in a Silicon Nanoscale Transistor,
Kuan Yen Tan, Kok Wai Chan, Mikko Möttönen, Andrea Morello, Changyi Yang, Jessica van Donkelaar, Andrew Alves, Juha-Matti Pirkkalainen, David N. Jamieson, Robert G. Clark, and Andrew S. Dzurak,
Nano Lett., Article ASAP, DOI: 10.1021/nl901635j (2009).
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl901635j

For more information, please contact:

Dr. Mikko Möttönen, Helsinki University of Technology, Department of Applied Physics, firstname.surname@tkk.fi, tel. +358 9 470 22342 or +358 50 594 0950

Prof. Andrew Dzurak, University of New South Wales, Centre for Quantum Computer Technology, a.dzurak [at] unsw.edu.au, tel. +61293856311