Electrons in silicon microstructures.

Silicon microstructures only a few hundred atoms wide can be fabricated and used to study electron transport in narrow channels. Spatially localized voltage probes as close together as 0.1 micrometer can be used to investigate a variety of physical phenomena, including velocity saturation due to phonon emission, the local potentials caused by scattering from a single trapped electron, and quantum tunneling or hopping among very few electron states.