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Metallic Coulomb blockade thermometry down to 10 mK and below
L Casparis1, M Meschke, D Maradan
1Department of Physics, University of Basel, CH-4056 Basel, Switzerland.
Abstract:
We present an improved nuclear refrigerator reaching 0.3 mK, aimed at microkelvin nanoelectronic experiments, and use it to investigate metallic Coulomb blockade thermometers (CBTs) with various resistances R. The high-R devices cool to slightly lower T, consistent with better isolation from the noise environment, and exhibit electron-phonon cooling [proportional] T(5) and a residual heat-leak of 40 aW. In contrast, the low-R CBTs display cooling with a clearly weaker T-dependence, deviating from the electron-phonon mechanism. The CBTs agree excellently with the refrigerator temperature above 20 mK and reach a minimum-T of 7.5 ± 0.2 mK.
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