No Arabic abstract
Superconducting material parameters of the Nb film coating on the Quarter-Wave Resonator (QWR) for the HIE-ISOLDE project were studied by fitting experimental results with the Mattis-Bardeen theory. We pointed out a strong correlation among fitted estimators of material parameters in the BCS theory, and proposed a procedure to remove the correlation by simultaneously fitting the surface resistance and effective penetration depth. Unlike previous studies, no literature values were assumed in the fitting. As surface resistance and penetration depth had a similar dependence on coherence length and mean free path, the correlation between these two parameters could not be eliminated by this fitting. The upper critical field measured by SQUID magnetometry showed complementary constraint to the RF result, and this allowed all the material parameters to be determined.
The HIE-ISOLDE project represents a major upgrade of the ISOLDE nuclear facility with a mandate to significantly improve the quality and increase the intensity and energy of radioactive nuclear beams produced at CERN. The project will expand the experimental nuclear physics programme at ISOLDE by focusing on an upgrade of the existing Radioactive ion beam EXperiment (REX) linac with a 40 MV superconducting linac comprising thirty-two niobium-on-copper sputter-coated quarter-wave resonators housed in six cryomodules. The new linac will raise the energy of post-accelerated beams from 3 MeV/u to over 10 MeV/u. The upgrade will be staged to first deliver beam energies of 5.5 MeV/u using two high-$beta$ cryomodules placed downstream of REX, before the energy variable section of the existing linac is replaced with two low-$beta$ cryomodules and two additional high-$beta$ cryomodules are installed to attain over 10 MeV/u with full energy variability above 0.45 MeV/u. An overview of the project including a status summary of the different R&D activities and the schedule will outlined.
A comment to the authors SRF Conference pre-print [1] was submitted by A. Gurevich to the arXiv [2]. In this response, we show that the arguments used in the comment are not valid. [1] arXiv:1309.3239 [2] arXiv:1309.5626
We describe a possible implementation of the nanomechanical quantum superposition generation and detection scheme described in the preceding, companion paper [Armour A D and Blencowe M P 2008 New. J. Phys. Submitted]. The implementation is based on the circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) set-up, with the addition of a mechanical degree of freedom formed out of a suspended, doubly-clamped segment of the superconducting loop of a dc SQUID located directly opposite the centre conductor of a coplanar waveguide (CPW). The relative merits of two SQUID based qubit realizations are addressed, in particular a capacitively coupled charge qubit and inductively coupled flux qubit. It is found that both realizations are equally promising, with comparable qubit-mechanical resonator mode as well as qubit-microwave resonator mode coupling strengths.
We report a strong effect of the cooling dynamics through $T_mathrm{c}$ on the amount of trapped external magnetic flux in superconducting niobium cavities. The effect is similar for fine grain and single crystal niobium and all surface treatments including electropolishing with and without 120$^circ$C baking and nitrogen doping. Direct magnetic field measurements on the cavity walls show that the effect stems from changes in the flux trapping efficiency: slow cooling leads to almost complete flux trapping and higher residual resistance while fast cooling leads to the much more efficient flux expulsion and lower residual resistance.
We propose a scheme in which the quantum coherence of a nanomechanical resonator can be probed using a superconducting qubit. We consider a mechanical resonator coupled capacitively to a Cooper-pair box and assume that the superconducting qubit is tuned to the degeneracy point so that its coherence time is maximised and the electro-mechanical coupling can be approximated by a dispersive Hamiltonian. When the qubit is prepared in a superposition of states this drives the mechanical resonator progressively into a superposition which in turn leads to apparent decoherence of the qubit. Applying a suitable control pulse to the qubit allows its population to be inverted resulting in a reversal of the resonator dynamics. However, the resonators interactions with its environment mean that the dynamics is not completely reversible. We show that this irreversibility is largely due to the decoherence of the mechanical resonator and can be inferred from appropriate measurements on the qubit alone. Using estimates for the parameters involved based on a specific realization of the system we show that it should be possible to carry out this scheme with existing device technology.