Advances toward high-accuracy gigahertz operation of tunable-barrier single-hole pumps in silicon

Abstract: Precise and reproducible current generation is key to realize quantum current standards in metrology. A promising candidate is a tunable-barrier single-charge pump, which can accurately transfer single charges one by one with an error rate of less than ppm level. Although several high-accuracy measurements have revealed such a high performance of the pumps, it is necessary to further pursue the possibility of high-precision operation toward reproducible generation of the pumping current in many devices. Here, we investigate in detail a silicon single-hole pumps, which are potentially expected to have a superior performance to single-electron pumps because of a heavy effective mass of holes. Temperature dependence measurements of current generated by the single-hole pump revealed a high energy selectivity of the tunnel barrier, which is a critical parameter to achieve high-accuracy operation. In addition, we applied the dynamic gate compensation technique to the single-hole pump and confirm the further performance improvement. Furthermore, we demonstrate gigahertz operation of a single-hole pump with an estimated lower bound of an error rate of around 0.01 ppm. These results imply a superior capability of single-hole pumps in silicon toward high-accuracy, high-speed, and stable single-charge pumping appropriate for not only metrological applications but also quantum device applications.