Experiment with Turnstiles of Single Electrons Lights Way Towards New Power Standard
upstart writes:
Experiment With Turnstiles of Single Electrons Lights Way Towards New Power Standard:
The world's most commonly used system of measurement, the International System of Units (SI), was redefined in 2019. Since then, units have needed to be defined in terms of the constants of Nature - that is, Nature's rules that are fixed and of no uncertainty, such as the speed of light - and not in terms of arbitrary references.
This has meant that new research for relating the many units of the system to the constants through experimental realizations has been called for.
"The redefinition has caused a need for new realizations," says Professor Jukka Pekola.
Researchers at Aalto University have now found a promising new way to link the watt (the unit of power) to the constants of Nature. They believe their method could show the way towards a new power standard, that is, a new way to produce an apriori known amount of power against which other power sources and detectors can be compared.
The researchers have developed a device that converts frequency to power. Frequency is a quantity that can be set with low uncertainty, and therefore it provides a solid basis for a new standard.
...] In the experiment, power is produced with a single-electron transistor in its turnstile operation. This device was previously proved by Pekola to work as a potential standard for the ampere, the unit of electrical current. It is constituted by a small metallic island, source and drain leads and a gate electrode, and it can address very small powers.
Journal Reference:
Marco Marin-Suarez, Joonas T. Peltonen, Dmitry S. Golubev, et al. An electron turnstile for frequency-to-power conversion, Nature Nanotechnology (DOI: 10.1038/s41565-021-01053-5)
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