Noise of a single electron emitter: Experiment

Abstract

We present here the experimental study of the short time correlations of the current fluctuations generated by a periodic single electron emitter. The electron emitter is a mesoscopic capacitor, a top gated quantum dot connected to a conductor via a tunable tunnel barrier. We observe a new fundamental noise for electrons which is associated with the quantum fluctuations of the electron emission time from one emission cycle to the other. This random jitter between the emission trigger and the single particle emission is related to the random nature of single particle tunneling and is intrinsic to any single particle emitter. When the emitter emits a single particle at each cycle with unit probability, the noise reduces to this fundamental jitter limit which demonstrates single particle emission.