We have studied Josephson tunneling through a circularly polarized micron or submicron-size disk of a soft ferromagnetic material. Such a disk contains a vortex that exhibits rich classical dynamics and has recently been proposed as a tool to study quantum dynamics of the nanoscale vortex core. The change in the Josephson current that is related to a tiny displacement of the vortex core has been computed analytically and plotted numerically for permalloy disks used in experiments. It is shown that a Josephson junction with a magnetic disk in the vortex state can be an interesting physical system that may be used to measure the nanoscale motion of the magnetic vortex.
Fluctuations of the current through a tunnel junction are measured using a Josephson junction. The current noise adds to the bias current of the Josephson junction and affects its switching out of the supercurrent branch. The experiment is carried out in a regime where switching is determined by thermal activation. The variance of the noise results in an elevated effective temperature, whereas the third cumulant, related to its asymmetric character, leads to a difference in the switching rates observed for opposite signs of the current through the tunnel junction. Measurements are compared quantitatively with recent theoretical predictions.
We couple a proximity Josephson junction to a Joule-heated normal metal film and measure its electron temperature under steady state and nonequilibrium conditions. With a timed sequence of heating and temperature probing pulses, we are able to monitor its electron temperature in nonequilibrium with effectively zero back-action from the temperature measurement in the form of additional dissipation or thermal conductance. The experiments demonstrate the possibility of using a fast proximity Josephson junction thermometer for studying thermal transport in mesoscopic systems and for calorimetry.
When two superconductors are connected across a ferromagnet, the spin configuration of the transferred Cooper pairs can be modulated due to magnetic exchange interaction. The resulting supercurrent can reverse its sign across the Josephson junction (JJ) [1-4]. Here we demonstrate Josephson phase modulation in van der Waals heterostructures when Cooper pairs from superconducting NbSe$_2$ tunnel through atomically thin magnetic insulator (MI) Cr$_2$Ge$_2$Te$_6$. Employing a superconducting quantum interference device based on MI JJs, we probe a doubly degenerate non-trivial JJ phase ($phi$) originating from the magnetic barrier. This $phi$-phase JJ is formed by momentum conserving tunneling of Ising Cooper pairs [5] across magnetic domains in the Cr$_2$Ge$_2$Te$_6$ barrier. The doubly degenerate ground states in MI JJs provide a two-level quantum system that can be utilized as a new disipationless component for superconducting quantum devices, including phase batteries [6], memories [7,8], and quantum Ratchets [9,10].
We investigate mesoscopic Josephson junction arrays created by patterning superconducting disks on monolayer graphene, concentrating on the high-$T/T_c$ regime of these devices and the phenomena which contribute to the superconducting glass state in diffusive arrays. We observe features in the magnetoconductance at rational fractions of flux quanta per array unit cell, which we attribute to the formation of flux-quantized vortices. The applied fields at which the features occur are well described by Ginzburg-Landau simulations that take into account the number of unit cells in the array. We find that the mean conductance and universal conductance fluctuations are both enhanced below the critical temperature and field of the superconductor, with greater enhancement away from the graphene Dirac point.
We demonstrate simultaneous measurements of DC transport properties and flux noise of a hybrid superconducting magnetometer based on the proximity effect (superconducting quantum interference proximity transistor, SQUIPT). The noise is probed by a cryogenic amplifier operating in the frequency range of a few MHz. In our non-optimized device, we achieve minimum flux noise $sim 4;muPhi_0/Hz^{1/2}$, set by the shot noise of the probe tunnel junction. The flux noise performance can be improved by further optimization of the SQUIPT parameters, primarily minimization of the proximity junction length and cross section. Furthermore, the experiment demonstrates that the setup can be used to investigate shot noise in other nonlinear devices with high impedance. This technique opens the opportunity to measure sensitive magnetometers including SQUIPT devices with very low dissipation.