Fabrication of Coulomb blockade devices by combination of high resolution Electron Beam Lithography and deposition of granular films

A reproducible fabrication method for Coulomb blockade devices which combines Electron Beam Lithography and granular gold film deposition is presented. The deposition parameters are optimised to produce gold grains of 4 nm diameter with distances between grains around 1 nm. Nanofabrication techniques developed to fully control the size of the dot array deposited between two contact electrodes are presented. In good agreement with previous numerical predictions, we find that the Coulomb gap of a two-dimensional disordered array increases with the linear array size.