The Coulomb blockade in two island systems with high conductive junctions

•Roland Schäfer, Bernhard Limbach, Peter vom Stein und Christoph Wallisser
Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Institut für Festkörperphysik, Postfach 3640, 76021 Karlsruhe

We report measurements on single electron pumps consisting of two metallic islands formed by three tunnel junctions in a row. We focus on the linear response conductance as a function of gate voltages and temperature of three samples with varying system parameters. In all cases strong quantum fluctuation phenomena are observed by a log(kBT/(2Eco))-reduction of the maximal conductance where Eco measures the coupling strength between the islands. The samples display a rich phenomenology culminating in a non-monotonic behavior of the maximal conductance as a function of temperature.