Question

7)

Describe briefly the electrical conduction phenomena caused by the Coulomb blockade in nanoparticles.

In short sentence

Answer 1

The phenomenon of Single electron tunneling such as Coulomb blockade have been widely attracting huge interest mainly due to their scientific and technical importance .Coulomb blockade of tunneling is actually a phenomenon which is observed in low capacitance tunnel junctions that is maintained usually at lower temperatures.

the process of tunneling of a single electron mainly causes the charging of the junction capacitance and hence it will block the tunneling for voltages below e/C. Here the symbol e stands for the electron charge and C is the capacitance of the junction . In order to observe the phenomenon of Coulomb blockade the charging energy Ec=e^2/2C should be kept as much large as possible close to the thermal energy kBT (kB is the Boltzmann constant and T is the temperature). hence for structures which is having micrometer and even sub micrometer dimensions this phenomenon is mainly observed even at low temperatures as low as below 1 K.