Analysis of single electron tunnelling oscillations in long arrays of tunnel junctions

Many single electron tunneling (SET) devices have been proposed to function as voltage or current dependent oscillators. Modeling the behavior of such devices in time and frequency domains is therefore needed in order to understand and predict the coherence and stability of the resulting oscillations. This paper presents a model that captures the statistics of the time domain properties together with the power spectral density of the SET signal. The technique is based on the determination of the distribution of time between events at a reference output junction. The model is then used to study the coherence of oscillations in long arrays of quantum dots. It is shown that longer arrays would generate more coherent oscillations than shorter arrays. The technique presented in this paper could be extended to simulate and study other SET configurations.