Macroscopic resonant tunneling between the two lowest lying states of a bistable RF-SQUID is used to characterize noise in a flux qubit. Measurements of the incoherent decay rate as a function of flux bias revealed a Gaussian shaped profile that is n
ot peaked at the resonance point, but is shifted to a bias at which the initial well is higher than the target well. The r.m.s. amplitude of the noise, which is proportional to the decoherence rate 1/T_2^*, was observed to be weakly dependent on temperature below 70 mK. Analysis of these results indicates that the dominant source of low frequency (1/f) flux noise in this device is a quantum mechanical environment in thermal equilibrium.
We investigated the time-dependent polarization switching behaviors of (111)-preferred polycrystalline Pb(ZrxTi1-x)O3 thin films with various Zr concentrations. We could explain all the polarization switching behaviors well by assuming Lorentzian dis
tributions in the logarithmic polarization switching time [Refer to J. Y. Jo et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. (in press)]. Based on this analysis, we found that the Zr ion-substitution for Ti ions would induce broad distributions in the local field due to defect dipoles, which makes the ferroelectric domain switching occur more easily.
We investigated domain kinetics by measuring the polarization switching behaviors of polycrystalline Pb(Zr,Ti)O$_{3}$ films, which are widely used in ferroelectric memory devices. Their switching behaviors at various electric fields and temperatures
could be explained by assuming the Lorentzian distribution of domain switching times. We viewed the switching process under an electric field as a motion of the ferroelectric domain through a random medium, and we showed that the local field variation due to dipole defects at domain pinning sites could explain the intriguing distribution.
