Coulomb Sensing of Single Ballistic Electrons

Abstract

While ballistic electrons are a key tool for applications in sensing and flying qubits, sub-nanosecond propagation times and complicated interactions make control of ballistic single electrons challenging. Recent experiments have revealed Coulomb collisions of counterpropagating electrons in a beam splitter, giving time resolved control of interactions between single electrons. Here we use remote Coulomb interactions to demonstrate a scheme for sensing single ballistic electrons. We show that interactions are highly controllable via electron energy and emission timing. We use a weakly coupled "sensing" regime to characterize the nanoscale potential landscape of the beam splitter and the strength of the Coulomb interaction. We also show multielectron sensing with picosecond resolution.