Condensed Matter

Switching current distributions have for decades been an indispensable diagnostic tool for studying Josephson junctions. They have played a key role in testing the conjecture of a macroscopic quantum state in junctions at millikelvin temperatures. The conventional basis of the test has been the observation of temperature independence of SCD peak widths, and that led to affirmative conclusions about a crossover. A different criterion is proposed here - the distance of the SCD peak from the junction critical current - and its efficacy is demonstrated. This test has distinct advantages in terms of precision, and it is found that, for three example experiments, the evidence for a crossover to the conjectured macroscopic quantum state is unequivocally negative. The implications of this finding for superconducting qubits are considered.

Recently discovered superconductivity in hole-doped nickelate Nd 0.8 Sr 0.2 NiO 2 caught intensive attention in the field. An immediate question is how to improve its superconducting properties. Guided by the key characteristics of electronic structures of the cuprates and the nickelates, we propose that nickel chalcogenides with a similar lattice structure should be a promising family of materials. Using NdNiS 2 as an example, we find this particular crystal structure a stable one, through first-principle structural optimization and phonon calculation. We justify our proposal by comparing with CaCuO 2 and NdNiO 2 the strength of the charge-transfer characteristics and the trend in their low-energy many-body effective Hamiltonians of doped hole carriers. These analysis indicates that nickel chalcogenides host low-energy physics closer to that of the cuprates, with stronger magnetic interaction than the nickelates, and thus deserve further experimental exploration. Our proposal also opens up the possibility of a wide range of parameter tuning through ligand substitution among chalcogenides, to further improve superconducting properties.

A quantum model for Josephson-based metamaterials working in the Three-Wave Mixing (3WM) and Four-Wave Mixing (4WM) regimes at the single-photon level is presented. The transmission line taken into account, namely Traveling Wave Josephson Parametric Amplifier (TWJPA), is a bipole composed by a chain of rf-SQUIDs which can be biased by a DC current or a magnetic field in order to activate the 3WM or 4WM nonlinearities. The model exploits a Hamiltonian approach to analytically determine the time evolution of the system both in the Heisenberg and interaction pictures. The former returns the analytic form of the gain of the amplifier, while the latter allows recovering the probability distributions vs. time of the photonic populations, for multimodal Fock and coherent input states. The dependence of the metamaterial's nonlinearities is presented in terms of circuit parameters in a lumped model framework while evaluating the effects of the experimental conditions on the model validity.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a self-calibrating detector of Cooper pair depairing in a superconductor based on a mesoscopic superconducting island coupled to normal metal leads. On average, exactly one electron passes through the device per broken Cooper pair, independent of the absorber volume, device or material parameters. The device operation is explained by a simple analytical model and verified with numerical simulations in quantitative agreement with experiment. In a proof-of-concept experiment, we use such a detector to measure the high-frequency phonons generated by another, electrically decoupled superconducting island, with a measurable signal resulting from less than 10 fW of dissipated power.

A variety of nickel oxide compounds have long been studied for their manifestation of various correlated electron phenomena. Recently, superconductivity was observed in nanoscale infinite layer nickelate thin films of Nd 0.8 Sr 0.2 NiO 2 , epitaxially stabilized on SrTiO 3 substrates via topotactic reduction from the perovskite precursor phase. Here we present the synthesis and properties of PrNiO 2 thin films on SrTiO 3 . Upon doping in Pr 0.8 Sr 0.2 NiO 2 , we observe superconductivity with a transition temperature of 7-12 K, and robust critical current density at 2 K of 334 kA/cm 2 . These findings indicate that superconductivity in the infinite layer nickelates is relatively insensitive to the details of the rare earth 4 f configuration. Furthermore, they motivate the exploration of a broader family of compounds based on two-dimensional NiO 2 planes, which will enable systematic investigation of the superconducting and normal state properties and their underlying mechanisms.

Superconducting devices, based on the Cooper pairing of electrons, are of outstanding importance in existing and emergent technologies, ranging from radiation detectors to quantum computers. Their performance is limited by spurious broken Cooper pairs also known as quasiparticle excitations. In state-of-the-art devices, the time-averaged number of quasiparticles can be on the order of one. However, realizing a superconductor with no excitations remains an outstanding challenge. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a superconductor completely free of quasiparticles up to seconds. The quasiparticle number on a mesoscopic superconductor is monitored in real time by measuring the charge tunneling to a normal metal contact. Quiet excitation-free periods are interrupted by random-in-time events, where one or several Cooper pairs break, followed by a burst of charge tunneling within a millisecond. Our results vindicate the opportunity to operate devices without quasiparticles with potentially improved performance. In addition, our present experiment probes the origins of nonequilibrium quasiparticles in it; the decay of the Cooper pair breaking rate over several weeks following the initial cooldown rules out processes arising from cosmic or long-lived radioactive sources.

The recent observation of superconductivity in infinite-layer Nd 1?�x Sr x NiO 2 thin films has attracted a lot of attention, since this compound is electronically and structurally analogous to the superconducting cuprates. Due to the challenges in the phase stabilization upon chemical doping with Sr, we synthesized artificial superlattices of LaNiO 3 embedded in insulating LaGaO 3 , and used layer-selective topotactic reactions to reduce the nickelate layers to LaNiO 2 . Hole doping is achieved via interfacial oxygen atoms and tuned via the layer thickness. We used electrical transport measurements, transmission electron microscopy, and x-ray spectroscopy together with ab initio calculations to track changes in the local nickel electronic configuration upon reduction and found that these changes are reversible. Our experimental and theoretical data indicate that the doped holes are trapped at the interfacial quadratic pyramidal Ni sites. Calculations for electron-doped cases predict a different behavior, with evenly distributed electrons among the layers, thus opening up interesting perspectives for interfacial doping of transition metal oxides.

We have developed a comprehensive theoretical model for predicting the magnetic field response of a parallel SQUID array in the voltage state. The model predictions are compared with our experimental data from a parallel SQUID array made of a YBCO thin-film patterned into wide tracks, busbars and leads, with eleven step-edge Josephson junctions. Our theoretical model uses the Josephson equations for resistively shunted junctions as well as the second Ginzburg-Landau equation to derive a system of coupled first-order nonlinear differential equations to describe the time-evolution of the Josephson junction phase differences which includes Johnson noise. Employing the second London equation and Biot-Savart's law, the supercurrent density distribution is calculated, using the stream function approach, which leads to a 2D second-order linear Fredholm integro-differential equation for the stream function with time-dependent boundary conditions. The novelty of the model is that it calculates the stream function everywhere in the thin-film structure to determine during the time-evolution the fluxoids for each SQUID array hole. Our numerical model calculations are compared with our experimental data and predict the bias-current versus voltage and the voltage versus magnetic field response with unprecedented accuracy. The model elucidates the importance to fully take Meissner shielding and current crowding into account in order to properly describe fluxoid focussing and bias-current injection. Furthermore, our model illustrates the failure of the simple lumped-element approach to describe a parallel SQUID array with a wide thin-film structure.

A well-established way to find novel Majorana particles in a solid-state system is to have superconductivity arising from the topological electronic structure. To this end, the heterostructure systems that consist of normal superconductor and topological material have been actively explored in the past decade. However, a search for the single material system that simultaneously exhibits intrinsic superconductivity and topological phase has been largely limited, although such a system is far more favorable especially for the quantum device applications. Here, we report the electronic structure study of a quasi-one-dimensional (q1D) superconductor TaSe 3 . Our results of angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and first-principles calculation clearly show that TaSe 3 is a topological superconductor. The characteristic bulk inversion gap, in-gap state and its shape of non-Dirac dispersion concurrently point to the topologically nontrivial nature of this material. The further investigations of the Z 2 indices and the topologically distinctive surface band crossings disclose that it belongs to the weak topological insulator (WTI) class. Hereby, TaSe 3 becomes the first verified example of an intrinsic 1D topological superconductor. It hopefully provides a promising platform for future applications utilizing Majorana bound states localized at the end of 1D intrinsic topological superconductors.

We extend the two leading methods for the \emph{ab initio} computational descrip tion of phonon-mediated superconductors, namely Eliashberg theory and density fu nctional theory for superconductors (SCDFT), to include plasmonic effects. Furth ermore, we introduce a hybrid formalism in which the Eliashberg approximation fo r the electron-phonon coupling is combined with the SCDFT treatment of the dynam ically screened Coulomb interaction. The methods have been tested on a set of we ll-known conventional superconductors by studying how the plasmon contribution a ffects the phononic mechanism in determining the critical temperature (\tc). Our simulations show that plasmonic SCDFT leads to a good agreement between predict ed and measured \tc's, whereas Eliashberg theory considerably overestimates the plasmon-mediated pairing and, therefore, \tc. The hybrid approach, on the other hand, gives results close to SCDFT and overall in excellent agreement with exper iments.