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Register a new userElectrical Modulation of Superconducting Critical Temperature in Liquid-Gated Thin Niobium Films
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We demonstrate that the superconducting critical temperature (Tc) of thin niobium films can be electrically modulated in a liquid-gated geometry device. Tc can be suppressed and enhanced by applying positive and negative gate voltage, respectively, in a reversible manner within a range of about 0.1 K. At a fixed temperature below Tc, we observed that the superconducting critical current can be modulated by gate voltage. This result suggests a possibility of an electrically-controlled switching device operating at or above liquid helium temperature, where superconductivity can be turned on or off solely by the applied gate voltage.
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Electrical generation of THz spin waves is theoretically explored in an antiferromangetic nanostrip via the current-induced spin-orbit torque. The analysis based on micromagnetic simulations clearly illustrates that the Neel-vector oscillations excited at one end of the magnetic strip can propagate in the form of a traveling wave when the nanostrip axis aligns with the magnetic easy-axis. A sizable threshold is observed in the driving current density or the torque to overcome the unfavorable anisotropy as expected. The generated spin waves are found to travel over a long distance while the angle of rotation undergoes continuous decay in the presence of non-zero damping. The oscillation frequency is tunable via the strength of the spin-orbit torque, reaching the THz regime. Other key characteristics of the spin waves such as the phase and the chirality can also be modulated actively. The simulation results further indicate the possibility of wave-like superposition between the excited spin oscillations, illustrating its application as an efficient source of spin-wave signals for information processing.
We present a high-resolution microwave spectrometer to measure the frequency-dependent complex conductivity of a superconducting thin film near the critical temperature. The instrument is based on a broadband measurement of the complex reflection coefficient, $S_{rm 11}$, of a coaxial transmission line, which is terminated to a thin film sample with the electrodes in a Corbino disk shape. In the vicinity of the critical temperature, the standard calibration technique using three known standards fails to extract the strong frequency dependence of the complex conductivity induced by the superconducting fluctuations. This is because a small unexpected difference between the phase parts of $S_{rm 11}$ for a short and load standards gives rise to a large error in the detailed frequency dependence of the complex conductivity near the superconducting transition. We demonstrate that a new calibration procedure using the normal-state conductivity of a sample as a load standard resolves this difficulty. The high quality performance of this spectrometer, which covers the frequency range between 0.1 GHz and 10 GHz, the temperature range down to 10 K, and the magnetic field range up to 1 T, is illustrated by the experimental results on several thin films of both conventional and high temperature superconductors.
We investigate thin film resistive thermometry based on metal-to-insulator-transition (niobium nitride) materials down to very low temperature. The variation of the NbN thermometer resistance have been calibrated versus temperature and magnetic field. High sensitivity in tempertaure variation detection is demonstrated through efficient temperature coefficient of resistance. The nitrogen content of the niobium nitride thin films can be tuned to adjust the optimal working temperature range. In the present experiment, we show the versatility of the NbN thin film technology through applications in very different low temperature use-cases. We demonstrate that thin film resistive thermometry can be extended to temperatures below 30 mK with low electrical impedance.
With a reduction in the average grain size in nanostructured films of elemental Nb, we observe a systematic crossover from metallic to weakly-insulating behavior. An analysis of the temperature dependence of the resistivity in the insulating phase clearly indicates the existence of two distinct activation energies corresponding to inter-granular and intra-granular mechanisms of transport. While the high temperature behavior is dominated by grain boundary scattering of the conduction electrons, the effect of discretization of energy levels due to quantum confinement shows up at low temperatures. We show that the energy barrier at the grain boundary is proportional to the width of the largely disordered inter-granular region, which increases with a decrease in the grain size. For a metal-insulator transition to occur in nano-Nb due to the opening up of an energy gap at the grain boundary, the critical grain size is ~ 8nm and the corresponding grain boundary width is ~ 1.1nm.
Thin superconducting films form a unique platform for geometrically-confined, strongly-interacting electrons. They allow an inherent competition between disorder and superconductivity, which in turn enables the intriguing superconducting-to-insulator transition and believed to facilitate the comprehension of high-Tc superconductivity. Furthermore, understanding thin film superconductivity is technologically essential e.g. for photo-detectors, and quantum-computers. Consequently, the absence of an established universal relationships between critical temperature ($T_c$), film thickness ($d$) and sheet resistance ($R_s$) hinders both our understanding of the onset of the superconductivity and the development of miniaturised superconducting devices. We report that in thin films, superconductivity scales as $d^.$$T_c(R_s)$. We demonstrated this scaling by analysing the data published over the past 46 years for different materials (and facilitated this database for further analysis). Moreover, we experimentally confirmed the discovered scaling for NbN films, quantified it with a power law, explored its possible origin and demonstrated its usefulness for superconducting film-based devices.
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