Abstract
The basis of synchronous manipulation of individual electrons in solid-state devices was laid by the rise of single electronics about two decades ago1,2,3. Ultrasmall structures in a low-temperature environment form an ideal domain for addressing electrons one by one. In the so-called metrological triangle, voltage from the Josephson effect and resistance from the quantum Hall effect would be tested against current via Ohm’s law for a consistency check of the fundamental constants of nature, ℏ and e (ref. 4). Several attempts to create a metrological current source that would comply with the demanding criteria of extreme accuracy, high yield and implementation with not too many control parameters have been reported5,6,7,8,9,10,11. Here, we propose and prove the unexpected concept of a hybrid normal-metal–superconductor turnstile in the form of a one-island single-electron transistor with one gate, which demonstrates robust current plateaux at multiple levels of e f at frequency f.
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Change history
08 April 2014
In the version of this Letter originally published, discussions of SNS and NSN transistors were reversed in the captions of Figs 1–3, with concomitant errors in the main text where those figures were referred to. The following text should have been in the caption of Fig. 1: 'In the SNS turnstile, the roles of aluminium and copper are swapped, that is the leads are superconducting and the island is normal-state.' The sentence at the top of the right column on page 123 proclaiming the absence of the parity effect in the measured SNS transistor should not have been included as the parity effect can only manifest in an NSN transistor. These errors have been corrected in the online versions of the Letter.
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Acknowledgements
We thank M. Paalanen and A. Manninen for fruitful discussions and A. Kemppinen for assistance in the measurements. The work was financially supported by the Technology Industries of Finland Centennial Foundation and by the Academy of Finland. D.V.A. was supported in part by NSF grant No. DMR-0325551 and M.M. by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
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Pekola, J., Vartiainen, J., Möttönen, M. et al. Hybrid single-electron transistor as a source of quantized electric current. Nature Phys 4, 120–124 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys808
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