Dynamic properties of high-T superconducting nano-junctions made with a focused helium ion beam.

The Josephson junction (JJ) is the corner stone of superconducting electronics and quantum information processing. While the technology for fabricating low T JJ is mature and delivers quantum circuits able to reach the "quantum supremacy", the fabrication of reproducible and low-noise high-T JJ is still a challenge to be taken up. Here we report on noise properties at RF frequencies of recently introduced high-T Josephson nano-junctions fabricated by mean of a Helium ion beam focused at sub-nanometer scale on a YBaCuO thin film.

Engineering two-dimensional superconductivity and Rashba spin-orbit coupling in LaAlO₃/SrTiO₃ quantum wells by selective orbital occupancy.

The discovery of two-dimensional electron gases (2DEGs) at oxide interfaces-involving electrons in narrow d-bands-has broken new ground, enabling the access to correlated states that are unreachable in conventional semiconductors based on s- and p- electrons. There is a growing consensus that emerging properties at these novel quantum wells-such as 2D superconductivity and magnetism-are intimately connected to specific orbital symmetries in the 2DEG sub-band structure. Here we show that crystal orientation allows selective orbital occupancy, disclosing unprecedented ways to tailor the 2DEG properties.

Tuning temperature and size of hot spots and hot-spot arrays.

By using scanning thermal microscopy, it is shown that nanoscale constrictions in metallic microwires deposited on an oxidized silicon substrate can be tuned in terms of temperature and confinement size. High-resolution temperature maps indeed show that submicrometer hot spots and hot-spot arrays are obtained when the SiO(2) layer thickness decreases below 100 nm. When the SiO(2) thickness becomes larger, heat is less confined in the vicinity of the constrictions and laterally spreads all along the microwire.