Electron Counting Capacitance Standard with an improved five-junction R-pump**Official contribution of the National Institute of Standards and Technology; not subject to copyright in the United States.

Abstract

The Electron Counting Capacitance Standard currently pursued at PTB aims to close the Quantum Metrological Triangle with a final precision of a few parts in 107. This paper reports the considerable progress recently achieved with a new generation of single-electron tunnelling devices. A five-junction R-pump was operated with a relative charge transfer error of five electrons in 107, and was used to successfully perform single-electron charging of a cryogenic capacitor. The preliminary result for the single-electron charge quantum has an uncertainty of less than two parts in 106 and is consistent with the value of the elementary charge.