An important field of work of our group is the controlled pumping of single electron in semiconductor nanostructures. Semiconductor single electron pumps in principle allow higher pumping frequencies and thus higher output currents than standard metallic SET pumps. By pumping in the GHz frequency regime output currents up to several nA can be realized which is crucial for most applications like the direct closure of the metrological triangle or clocked single photon sources.

We concentrate on a novel pumping mechanism in semiconductor nanostructures using strongly modulated electrostatic barriers [1]. The present work focuses on pumping by modulation of a single parameter [2] and on parallelization of single charge pump to further increase the current output.

Single electron pump from a GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructure		Pumping of single electrons by modulation of a single gate parameter. Up to five electrons are transferred per pump cycle.