  The nanomechanical single-electron shuttle is a resonant system in which a
suspended metallic island oscillates between and impacts at two electrodes.
This setup holds promise for one-by-one electron transport and the
establishment of an absolute current standard. While the charge transported per
oscillation by the nanoscale island will be quantized in the Coulomb blockade
regime, the frequency of such a shuttle depends sensitively on many parameters,
leading to drift and noise. Instead of considering the nonlinearities
introduced by the impact events as a nuisance, here we propose to exploit the
resulting nonlinear dynamics to realize a highly precise oscillation frequency
via synchronization of the shuttle self-oscillations to an external signal.
