(By: LION/EA)
On December 18th, 2015, the foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) decided to divide an amount of in total of 3.3 million Euro over nine research proposals. One of the granted projects, 'Single-particle emitters for superconducting nanostructures' was proposed by Leiden researcher Carlo Beenakker.

Beenakker explains: 'When we speak of the flow of electrical current we know that there are discrete particles, electrons, that actually carry the current. The miniaturization of electronic circuits has reached the point that this granularity starts to play a role and we can envisage an electrical current carried by a single electron. To control this current it would be desirable to have a source that injects one electron at the time, on demand. The aim of this project is to explore the effect of superconductivity on such an "electron gun". One new capability that emerges is the possibility to control the charge of the injected particle. Such a device would be particularly useful in quantum information processing, because it could be used as a source of charge-neutral pairs of entangled particles.'