No Arabic abstract
We study thermal instability in NbN superconducting stripline resonators. The system exhibits extreme nonlinearity near a bifurcation, which separates a monostable zone and an astable one. The lifetime of the metastable state, which is locally stable in the monostable zone, is measure near the bifurcation and the results are compared with a theory. Near bifurcation, where the lifetime becomes relatively short, the system exhibits strong amplification of a weak input modulation signal. We find that the frequency bandwidth of this amplification mechanism is limited by the rate of thermal relaxation. When the frequency of the input modulation signal becomes comparable or larger than this rate the response of the system exhibits sub-harmonics of various orders.
An atom in open space can be detected by means of resonant absorption and reemission of electromagnetic waves, known as resonance fluorescence, which is a fundamental phenomenon of quantum optics. We report on the observation of scattering of propagating waves by a single artificial atom. The behavior of the artificial atom, a superconducting macroscopic two-level system, is in a quantitative agreement with the predictions of quantum optics for a pointlike scatterer interacting with the electromagnetic field in one-dimensional open space. The strong atom-field interaction as revealed in a high degree of extinction of propagating waves will allow applications of controllable artificial atoms in quantum optics and photonics.
We study the stability of the paired fermionic p-wave superfluid made out of identical atoms all in the same hyperfine state close to a p-wave Feshbach resonance. First we reproduce known results concerning the lifetime of a 3D superfluid, in particular, we show that it decays at the same rate as its interaction energy, thus precluding its equilibration before it decays. Then we proceed to study its stability in case when the superfluid is confined to 2D by means of an optical harmonic potential. We find that the relative stability is somewhat improved in 2D in the BCS regime, such that the decay rate is now slower than the appropriate interaction energy scale. The improvement in stability, however, is not dramatic and one probably needs to look for other mechanisms to suppress decay to create a long lived 2D p-wave fermionic superfluid.
The increasing capacity of modern computers, driven by Moores Law, is accompanied by smaller noise margins and higher error rates. In this paper we propose a memory device, consisting of a ring of two identical overdamped bistable forward-coupled oscillators, which may serve as a building block in a larger scale solution to this problem. We show that such a system is capable of storing one bit and its performance improves with the addition of noise. The proposed device can be regarded as asynchronous, in the sense that stored information can be retrieved at any time and, after a certain synchronization time, the probability of erroneous retrieval does not depend on the interrogated oscillator. We characterize memory persistence time and show it to be maximized for the same noise range that both minimizes the probability of error and ensures synchronization. We also present experimental results for a hard-wired version of the proposed memory, consisting of a loop of two Schmitt triggers. We show that this device is capable of storing one bit and does so more efficiently in the presence of noise.
We use neutron scattering to study magnetic excitations near the antiferromagnetic wave vector in the underdoped single-layer cuprate HgBa2CuO4+{delta} (superconducting transition temperature Tc ~ 88 K, pseudogap temperature T* ~ 220 K). The response is distinctly enhanced below T* and exhibits a Y-shaped dispersion in the pseudogap state, whereas the superconducting state features an X-shaped (hourglass) dispersion and a further resonance-like enhancement. A large spin gap of about 40 meV is observed in both states. This phenomenology is reminiscent of that exhibited by bilayer cuprates. The resonance spectral weight, irrespective of doping and compound, scales linearly with the putative binding energy of a spin-exciton described by an itinerant-spin formalism.
Photoexcitations on a superconductor using ultrafast nir-infrared (NIR) pulses, whose energy is much higher than the superconducting energy gap, are expected to suppress/destroy superconductivity by breaking Cooper pairs and excite quasiparticles from occupied state to unoccupied state far above the Fermi level. This appears to be true only for small pumping fluence. Here we show that the intense NIR pumping has different effect. We perform an intense NIR pump, c-axis terahertz probe measurement on an electron-doped cuprate superconductor Pr$_{0.88}$LaCe$_{0.12}$CuO$_4$ with T$_c$=22 K. The measurement indicates that, instead of destroying superconductivity or exciting quasiparticles, the intense NIR pump drives the system from an equilibrium superconducting state with uniform Josephson coupling strength to a new metastable superconducting phase with modulated Josephson coupling strengths below T$_c$.