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Updated: Jul 5, 2026

All-electronic Nanosecond-resolved Scanning Tunneling Microscopy: Facilitating the Investigation of Single Dopant Charge Dynamics
Published on: January 19, 2018
Study of single silicon quantum dots' band gap and single-electron charging energies by room temperature scanning
Bashir Zaknoon1, Gad Bahir, Cecile Saguy
1Department of Electrical Engineering, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel.
Abstract:
Scanning tunneling spectroscopy in the shell-filling regime was carried out at room temperature to investigate the size dependence of the band gap and single-electron charging energy of single Si quantum dots (QDs). The results are compared with model calculation. A 12-fold multiple staircase structure was observed for a QD of about 4.3 nm diameter, reflecting the degeneracy of the first energy level, as expected from theoretical calculations. The systematic broadening of the tunneling spectroscopy peaks with decreasing dot diameter is attributed to the reduced barrier height for smaller dot sizes and to the splitting of the first energy level.
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