Publications

Excited states and valley effects in a negatively charged impurity in a silicon FinFET

Rahman, Rajib R.; Muller, Richard P.; Carroll, Malcolm

The observation and characterization of a single atom system in silicon is a significant landmark in half a century of device miniaturization, and presents an important new laboratory for fundamental quantum and atomic physics. We compare with multi-million atom tight binding (TB) calculations the measurements of the spectrum of a single two-electron (2e) atom system in silicon - a negatively charged (D-) gated Arsenic donor in a FinFET. The TB method captures accurate single electron eigenstates of the device taking into account device geometry, donor potentials, applied fields, interfaces, and the full host bandstructure. In a previous work, the depths and fields of As donors in six device samples were established through excited state spectroscopy of the D0 electron and comparison with TB calculations. Using self-consistent field (SCF) TB, we computed the charging energies of the D- electron for the same six device samples, and found good agreement with the measurements. Although a bulk donor has only a bound singlet ground state and a charging energy of about 40 meV, calculations show that a gated donor near an interface can have a reduced charging energy and bound excited states in the D- spectrum. Measurements indeed reveal reduced charging energies and bound 2e excited states, at least one of which is a triplet. The calculations also show the influence of the host valley physics in the two-electron spectrum of the donor.