F. BATTISTA - Single particle sources - State of the art: the Levitons

Francesca Battista.

DF - FCEyN - UBA.

Jueves 5/6/2014, 14 hs.
Aula Seminario, 2do piso, Pabellón I.

Resumen:

The miniaturization of electronic devices is a well known trend in engineering since almost 50 years. The technological advancement in the field can now guarantee an astonishing good control of charge transport in mesoscopic structures. While a macroscopic electrical current is perceived as a continuous quantity and it is given by a large, uncontrolled number of propagating electrons characterized by large fluctuations, it is now possible to realize mesoscopic devices able to induce current pulses given by controlled number of electrons or holes during a desired time interval, in a desired area of a circuit and characterized by very low fluctuations. These devices are called single particle sources (SPSs) and have very important applications in the fields of metrology and quantum information. The precision of SPSs is limited by the fluctuations due to extra electron-hole excitations induced by the time periodic driving of the system. One of the possible experimental realizations of a SPS is the application of a Lorentzian pulse to a conductor. In special cases this creates an ideal noiseless quantized particle stream also referred to as Levitons. In this colloquium I will provide a brief overview of different experimental realizations of single particle sources with a special focus on the Levitons.