High-accuracy current generation in the nanoampere regime from a silicon single-trap electron pump A gigahertz single-electron (SE) pump with a semiconductor charge island is promising for a future quantum current standard. However, high-accuracy current in the nanoampere (10-9 A) regime is still difficult to achieve because the performance of SE pumps tends to degrade significantly at frequencies exceeding 1 GHz. NTT (Japan) and NPL (UK) have shown robust… Read More
First 10 part-per-billion quantum realisation of the ampere Researchers from the Laboratoire National d’Essais (LNE) have developed a quantum current standard able to generate currents of values in a range from microamperes (10-6 A) to milliamperes (10-3 A) accurately linked to the elementary charge with a targeted relative uncertainty of 10 parts in a billion. This breakthrough relies on an error-free application of… Read More
Robustness of single-electron pumps at sub-ppm current accuracy level A new accuracy record in measurements on single-electron pumps has been demonstrated by PTB. 0.16 µA/A of relative combined uncertainty was reached within less than 1 day of measurement time. Robustness tests of pump operation on the sub-ppm level revealed good stability of tunable-barrier pumps against variations in the operating parameters. Single-electron (SE) pumps are promising… Read More
e-SI-Amp@CPEM 2016 The Conference on Precision Electromagnetic Measurements is the most important conference in the field of electrical metrology. Held every two years, it brings together representatives from National Measurement Institutes, Universities and Industry to discuss state of the art measurement techniques and issues surrounding the measurement system. The conference in 2016 was held in Ottowa, Canada. A significant… Read More
First 10 part-per-billion quantum realisation of the ampere At a microscopic level, electrical current is most often described as a flow of charged particles. While the size of an electrical current can therefore be quantified using a ‘particle flow rate’, this is not the way that the base unit of electrical current in the International System of units (SI) the ampere is presently defined. Instead,… Read More
Electron pump animation Click the image to see a schematic of the pumping action of a tunable barrier pump. … Read More
