We show that individual dopant atoms dominate the transport characteristics of nanometer sized devices, by investigating metal semiconductor diodes down to 15 nm diameter. Room temperature measurements reveal a strongly increasing scatter in the device-to-device conductance towards smaller device sizes. The low-temperature measurements exhibit pronounced features, caused by resonant tunneling through electronic states of individual dopant atoms. We demonstrate by a statistical analysis that this behavior can be explained by the presence of randomly distributed individual dopant atoms in the space charge region.
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0309137,
title = {Conductance distribution in nanometer-sized semiconductor devices due to dopant statistics},
author = {G. D. J. Smit and S. Rogge and J. Caro and T. M. Klapwijk},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0309137},
year = {2009}
}