Single-Atom Transistor Discovered

The research was conducted by scientists from Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), University of New South Wales (Australia), and University of Melbourne (Australia) and published in Nano Letters, a journal of the American Chemical Society.

The working principles of the device are based on sequential tunneling of single electrons between the phosphorus atom and the source and drain leads of the transistor. The tunneling can be suppressed or allowed by controlling the voltage on a nearby metal electrode with a width of a few tens of nanometers.

The rapid development of computers, which created the present information society, has been mainly based on the reduction of the size of transistors. Scientists have known for a long time that this development has to slow down critically during the future decades when the even tighter inexpensive packing of transistors would require them to shrink down to the atomic length scales. In the recently developed transistor, all the electric current passes through the same single atom. This allows researchers to study the effects arising in the extreme limit of the transistor size.

Source www.sciencedaily.com .