We measure the rectified dc currents resulting when a 3-terminal semiconductor device with gate-dependent conductance is driven with an ac gate voltage. The rectified currents exhibit surprisingly complex behaviour as the dc source-drain bias voltage, the dc gate voltage and the amplitude of the ac gate voltage are varied. We obtain good agreement between our data and a model based on simple assumptions about the stray impedances on the sample chip, over a wide frequency range. This method is applicable to many types of experiment which involve ac gating of a non-linear device, and where an undesireable rectified contribution to the measured signal is present. Finally, we evaluate the small rectified currents flowing in tunable-barrier electron pumps operated in the pinched-off regime. These currents are at most 10−12 of the pumped current for a pump current of 100 pA. This result is encouraging for the development of tunable-barrier pumps as metrological current standards.
@article{arxiv.1809.10380,
title = {Rectification in mesoscopic AC-gated semiconductor devices},
author = {S. P. Giblin and M. Kataoka and J. D. Fletcher and P. See and T. J. B. M. Janssen and J. P. Griffiths and G. A. C. Jones and I. Farrer and D. A. Ritchie},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.10380},
year = {2018}
}