No Arabic abstract
Direct frequency to power conversion (FPC), to be presented here, links both quantities through a known energy, like single-electron transport relates an operation frequency $f$ to the emitted current $I$ through the electron charge $e$ as $I=ef$. FPC is a natural candidate for a power standard resorting to the most basic definition of the watt, comprising a simple and elegant way to realize it. In this spirit, single-photon emission and detection at known rates have been proposed and experimented as radiometric standard. However, nowadays power standards are only traceable to electrical units with no alternative proposals in sight. In this letter, we demonstrate the feasibility of solid-state direct FPC using a SINIS (S = superconductor, N = normal metal, I = insulator) single-electron transistor (SET) accurately injecting $N$ (integer) quasiparticles (qps) per cycle to both leads with discrete energies close to their superconducting gap $Delta$, even at zero drain-source voltage. Furthermore, the bias voltage plays an important role in the distribution of the power among the two leads, allowing for an almost equal injection $NDelta f$ to the two. We estimate that under appropriate conditions errors can be well below $1%$.
We have experimentally studied the behaviour of the so-called Cooper pair pump (CPP) with three Josephson junctions, in the limit of small Josephson coupling EJ < EC. These experiments show that the CPP can be operated as a traditional turnstile device yielding a gate-induced current 2ef in the direction of the bias voltage, by applying an RF-signal with frequency f to the two gates in phase, while residing at the degeneracy node of the gate plane. Accuracy of the CPP during this kind of operation was about 3% and the fundamental Landau-Zener limit was observed to lie above 20 MHz. We have also measured the current pumped through the array by rotating around the degeneracy node in the gate plane. We show that this reproduces the turnstile-kind of behavior. To overcome the contradiction between the obtained e-periodic DC-modulation and a pure 2e-behaviour in the RF-measurements, we base our observations on a general principle that the system always minimises its energy. It suggests that if the excess quasiparticles in the system have a freedom to tunnel, they will organize themselves to the configuration yielding the highest current.
We consider electron drag in a system of two ferromagnetic layers separated by an insulating interface. The source of it is expected to be magnon-electron interactions. Namely, we assume that the external voltage is applied to the active layer stimulating electric current through this layer. In its turn, the scattering of the current-carrying electrons by magnons leads to a magnon drag current within this layer. The 3-magnons interactions between magnons in the two layers (being of non-local nature) lead to magnon drag within the passive layer which, correspondingly, produce electron drag current via processes of magnon-electron scattering. We estimate the drag current and compare it to the phonon-induced one.
We report on the realization of a single-electron source, where current is transported through a single-level quantum dot (Q), tunnel-coupled to two superconducting leads (S). When driven with an ac gate voltage, the experiment demonstrates electron turnstile operation. Compared to the more conventional superconductor - normal metal - superconductor turnstile, our SQS device presents a number of novel properties, including higher immunity to the unavoidable presence of non-equilibrium quasiparticles in superconducting leads. In addition, we demonstrate its ability to deliver electrons with a very narrow energy distribution.
We demonstrate electron spin polarization detection and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy using a direct current superconducting quantum interference device (dc-SQUID) magnetometer. Our target electron spin ensemble is directly glued on the dc-SQUID magnetometer that detects electron spin polarization induced by a external magnetic field or EPR in micrometer-sized area. The minimum distinguishable number of polarized spins and sensing volume of the electron spin polarization detection and the EPR spectroscopy are estimated to be $sim$$10^6$ and $sim$$10^{-10}$ $mathrm{cm}^{3}$ ($sim$0.1 pl), respectively.
b{eta}-PdBi2 has attracted much attention for its prospective ability to possess simultaneously topological surface and superconducting states due to its unprecedented spin-orbit interaction (SOC). Whereas most works have focused solely on investigating its topological surface states, the coupling between spin and charge degrees of freedom in this class of quantum material remains unexplored. Here we first report a study of spin-to-charge conversion in a b{eta}-PdBi2 ultrathin film grown by molecular beam epitaxy, utilizing a spin pumping technique to perform inverse spin Hall effect measurements. We find that the room temperature spin Hall angle of Fe/b{eta}-PdBi2, {theta}_SH=0.037. This value is one order of magnitude larger than that of reported conventional superconductors, and is comparable to that of the best SOC metals and topological insulators. Our results provide an avenue for developing superconductor-based spintronic applications.