Current correlations of an on-demand single-electron emitter

Abstract

In analogy with quantum optics, short-time correlations of the current fluctuations are measured and used to assess the quality of the single-particle emission of a recently introduced on-demand electron source. We observe, in the context of electronics, the fundamental noise limit associated with the quantum fluctuations of the emission time of single particles, or quantum jittering. In optimum operating conditions of the source, the noise reduces to the quantum jitter limit, which demonstrates single-particle emission. Combined with the coherent manipulations of single electrons in a quantum conductor, this electron quantum optics experiment opens the way to explore new problems including quantum statistics and interactions at the single-electron level.