Friday 21 June 2013

Harnessing the potential of quantum tunneling: Transistors without semiconductors

Harnessing the potential of quantum tunneling: Transistors without semiconductors

For decades, electronic devices have been getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller. It's now possible—even routine—to place millions of transistors on a single silicon chip.
Beyond silicon: Transistors without semiconductors
Electrons flash across a series of gold quantum dots deposited on a boron nitride nanotubes. Scientists at Michigan Technological University made the quantum-tunneling device, which behaves like a transistor at room temperature, without using any semiconducting materials. Credit: Yoke Khin Yap
But transistors based on semiconductors can only get so small. "At the rate the current technology is progressing, in 10 or 20 years, they won't be able to get any smaller," said physicist Yoke Khin Yap of Michigan Technological University. "Also, semiconductors have another disadvantage: they waste a lot of energy in the form of heat."
Scientists have experimented with different materials and designs for transistors to address these issues, always using semiconductors like silicon. Back in 2007, Yap wanted to try something different that might open the door to a new age of electronics.
"The idea was to make a transistor using a nanoscale insulator with nanoscale metals on top," he said. "In principle, you could get a piece of plastic and spread a handful of metal powders on top to make the devices, if you do it right. But we were trying to create it in nanoscale, so we chose a nanoscale insulator,  nanotubes, or BNNTs for the substrate."
Yap's team had figured out how to make virtual carpets of BNNTs, which happen to be insulators and thus highly resistant to . Using lasers, the team then placed quantum dots (QDs) of gold as small as three  across on the tops of the BNNTs, forming QDs-BNNTs. BNNTs are ideal substrates for these quantum dots due to their small, controllable, and uniform diameters, as well as their insulating nature. BNNTs confine the size of the dots that can be deposited.
In collaboration with scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), they fired up electrodes on both ends of the QDs-BNNTs at room temperature, and something interesting happened. Electrons jumped very precisely from gold dot to gold dot, a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling.
"Imagine that the nanotubes are a river, with an  on each bank. Now imagine some very tiny stepping stones across the river," said Yap. "The electrons hopped between the gold stepping stones. The stones are so small, you can only get one electron on the stone at a time. Every electron is passing the same way, so the device is always stable."


Read more at: http://phys.org

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