Traceable Coulomb blockade thermometry

Abstract

We present a measurement and analysis scheme for determining traceable thermodynamic temperature at cryogenic temperatures using Coulomb blockade thermometry. The uncertainty of the electrical measurement is improved by utilizing two sampling digital voltmeters instead of the traditional lock-in technique. The remaining uncertainty is dominated by that of the numerical analysis of the measurement data. Two analysis methods are demonstrated: numerical fitting of the full conductance curve and measuring the height of the conductance dip. The complete uncertainty analysis shows that using either analysis method the relative combined standard uncertainty (k = 1) in determining the thermodynamic temperature in the temperature range from 20 mK to 200 mK is below 0.5 %. In this temperature range, both analysis methods produced temperature estimates that deviated from 0.39 % to 0.67 % from the reference temperatures provided by a superconducting reference point device calibrated against the Provisional Low Temperature Scale of 2000.

Thermionic junction devices utilizing phonon blocking

“…Furthermore, Fourier transform analysis provides extra information from the noise spectrum, which helps to detect potential problems arising, e.g., from minor mistakes in measurement circuits. See (47) for details.…”

Thermal and Electrical Performance Study of Cold-Finger ³He Cryostat in Precision Measurement of Quantum Hall Resistance and Single-Electron Current

“…This low intensity magnetic field would not cause a CeO x sensor error greater than 1%. The CBT sensor, as a primary sensor, is also known to have an error less than 1% [9].…”

Coulomb Blockade Thermometry Beyond the Universal Regime

“…This enables a primary measurement of the electron temperature [5], which is insensitive to the device geometry, the external magnetic field [6] and the electrostatic environment of the device [7]. This property makes Coulomb blockade thermometry favorable for metrological applications [8][9][10][11], and several experiments were performed in cryogenic temperatures ranging down to the millikelvin [12][13][14][15][16][17][18] and submillikelvin regime [19] as well as up to 60 K [20].…”