Conductance modulation by individual acceptors in Si nanoscale field-effect transistors

The authors measured low-temperature $(6–28K)$ conductance in nanoscale $p$-channel field-effect transistors lightly doped with boron. They observed a conductance modulation, which they ascribed to the trapping/detrapping of single holes by/from individual acceptors. The statistics of the appearance of the modulation in a few ten samples indicates that the number of acceptors is small, or even just one, suggesting that what the authors have observed is single-charge-transistor operation by a single-acceptor quantum dot.