We calculate the charge sensitivity of a recently demonstrated device where the Josephson inductance of a single Cooper-pair transistor is measured. We find that the intrinsic limit to detector performance is set by oscillator quantum noise. Sensitivity better than $10^{-6}$e$/sqrt{mathrm{Hz}}$ is possible with a high $Q$-value $sim 10^3$, or using a SQUID amplifier. The model is compared to experiment, where charge sensitivity $3 times 10^{-5}$e$/sqrt{mathrm{Hz}}$ and bandwidth 100 MHz are achieved.
We demonstrate a sensitive method of charge detection based on radio-frequency readout of the Josephson inductance of a superconducting single-electron transistor. Charge sensitivity $1.4 times 10^{-4}e/sqrt{Hz}$, limited by preamplifier, is achieved in an operation mode which takes advantage of the nonlinearity of the Josephson potential. Owing to reactive readout, our setup has more than two orders of magnitude lower dissipation than the existing method of radio-frequency electrometry. With an optimized sample, we expect uncoupled energy sensitivity below $hbar$ in the same experimental scheme.
We present a linear-response theory for the thermopower of a single-electron transistor consisting of a superconducting island weakly coupled to two normal-conducting leads (NSN SET). The thermopower shows oscillations with the same periodicity as the conductance and is rather sensitive to the size of the superconducting gap. In particular, the previously studied sawtooth-like shape of the thermopower for a normal-conducting single-electron device is qualitatively changed even for small gap energies.
We present an analysis of the dynamics of a nanomechanical resonator coupled to a superconducting single electron transistor (SSET) in the vicinity of the Josephson quasiparticle (JQP) and double Josephson quasiparticle (DJQP) resonances. For weak coupling and wide separation of dynamical timescales, we find that for either superconducting resonance the dynamics of the resonator is given by a Fokker-Planck equation, i.e., the SSET behaves effectively as an equilibrium heat bath, characterised by an effective temperature, which also damps the resonator and renormalizes its frequency. Depending on the gate and drain-source voltage bias points with respect to the superconducting resonance, the SSET can also give rise to an instability in the mechanical resonator marked by negative damping and temperature within the appropriate Fokker-Planck equation. Furthermore, sufficiently close to a resonance, we find that the Fokker-Planck description breaks down. We also point out that there is a close analogy between coupling a nanomechanical resonator to a SSET in the vicinity of the JQP resonance and Doppler cooling of atoms by means of lasers.
We have directly measured the quantum noise of a superconducting single-electron transistor (S-SET) embedded in a microwave resonator consisting of a superconducting LC tank circuit. Using an effective bath description, we find that the S-SET provides damping of the resonator modes proportional to its differential conductance and has an effective temperature that depends strongly on the S-SET bias conditions. In the vicinity of a double Cooper pair resonance, when both resonances are red detuned the S-SET effective temperature can be well below both the ambient temperature and the energy scale of the bias voltage. When blue detuned, the S-SET shows negative differential conductivity,
Spin pumping consists in the injection of spin currents into a non-magnetic material due to the precession of an adjacent ferromagnet. In addition to the pumping of spin the precession always leads to pumping of heat, but in the presence of spin-orbital entanglement it also leads to a charge current. We investigate the pumping of charge, spin and heat in a device where a superconductor and a quantum spin Hall insulator are in proximity contact with a ferromagnetic insulator. We show that the device supports two robust operation regimes arising from topological effects. In one regime, the pumped charge, spin and heat are quantized and related to each other due to a topological winding number of the reflection coefficient in the scattering matrix formalism -- translating to a Chern number in the case of Hamiltonian formalism. In the second regime, a Majorana zero mode switches off the pumping of currents owing to the topologically protected perfect Andreev reflection. We show that the interplay of these two topological effects can be utilized so that the device operates as a robust charge, spin and heat transistor.