A fundamental property of most single-electron devices with a quasicontinuous quasiparticle spectrum on an island is the periodicity of their transport characteristics in a gate voltage. This property is robust even with respect to placing ferroelectric insulators in the source and drain tunnel junctions. We show that placing a ferroelectric insulator inside the gate capacitance breaks this periodicity. The current-voltage characteristics of this single-electron transistor strongly depends on the ferroelectric polarization and shows a giant memory effect even for negligible ferroelectric hysteresis making this device promising for memory applications.

• Received 27 August 2014
• Revised 20 October 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.90.195111