Electrons have so little mass that in less than a second they can tunnel through potential energy barriers that are several electron-volts high and several nanometers wide. Electron tunneling is a critical functional element in a broad spectrum of applications, ranging from semiconductor diodes to the photosynthetic and respiratory charge transport chains. Prior to the 1970s, chemists generally...

The electron field emission properties of the nanodiamond films were examined using scanning tunneling microscopic sSTMd technique. Current image tunneling spectroscopic measurements reveal the direct dependence of electron tunneling/field emission behavior of the films on the proportion of grain boundaries present. Local tunneling current-voltage sIt–Vd measurements show that incorporation of ...

We analyze generation of phonons in tunneling structures with two electron states coupled by electron-phonon interaction. The conditions of strong vibration excitations are determined and dependence of non-equilibrium phonon occupation numbers on the applied bias is found. For high vibration excitation levels self consistent theory for the tunneling transport is presented. Tunneling current ind...

We show that in a magnetic field parallel to a two-dimensional ~2D! electron layer, strong electron correlations can change the rate of tunneling from the layer to the 3D continuum exponentially. It leads to a specific density dependence of the escape rate. The mechanism is a dynamical Mössbauer-type recoil, in which the Hall momentum of the tunneling electron is partly transferred to the whole...

We investigate tunneling decay in a magnetic field. Because of broken time-reversal symmetry, the standard WKB technique does not apply. The decay rate and the outcoming wave packet are found from the analysis of the set of the particle Hamiltonian trajectories and its singularities in complex space. The results are applied to tunneling from a strongly correlated 2D electron system in a magneti...

Tunneling of electrons traversing a few-electron quantum dot is strongly influenced by the Coulomb interaction leading to Coulomb blockade effects and single-electron tunneling. We present calculations which demonstrate that correlations between the electrons cause a strong suppression of most of the energetically allowed tunneling processes involving excited dot states. The excitation of cente...

A resolvent formalism is applied to the problem of inelastic scattering of an electron linearly coupled to a set of phonon modes. It is shown how the many phonon mode coupling and excitation can be reduced to a single phonon mode description, consistent with other approaches to the phenomenon of inelastic tunneling in heterostructures. A unifying connection is made with the phenomena of resonan...

We combine scanning-tunneling-spectroscopy experiments probing magnetic impurities on a superconducting surface with a theoretical analysis of the tunneling processes between (superconducting) tip and substrate. We show that the current through impurity-induced Shiba bound states is carried by single-electron tunneling at large tip-substrate distances and Andreev reflections at smaller distance...

Abnormal increase of low frequency flicker noise in analog nMOSFETs with gate oxide in valence band tunneling domain is investigated. In 15Å oxide devices, valence-band electron tunneling from Si substrate to poly-gate occurs at a positive gate voltage and results in the splitting of electron and hole quasi Fermi-levels in the channel. The excess low frequency noise is attributed to electron an...

We investigate correlation effects in the regime of a few electrons in uncapped InAs quantum dots by tunneling spectroscopy and wave function (WF) mapping at high tunneling currents where electron-electron interactions become relevant. Four clearly resolved states are found, whose approximate symmetries are roughly s and p, in order of increasing energy. Because the major axes of the p-like sta...