Highly sensitive polarimetric camera (B-BOP) for the SPICA mission.

The Space Infrared telescope for Cosmology and Astrophysics (SPICA) mission has just been selected by the European Space Agency as one of the three candidate missions to be further studied for the medium size mission M5. B-BOP, formerly named POL, is one of the three scientific instruments of SPICA which aims, among other scientific goals, to map the galactic filamentary structures and their associated magnetic fields. With a novel interlaced-shaped design, B-BOP will contain 1344 pixels, operating within a temperature range of 50-100 mK, covering a 2.

Thermal and quantum depletion of superconductivity in narrow junctions created by controlled electromigration.

Superconducting nanowires currently attract great interest due to their application in single-photon detectors and quantum-computing circuits. In this context, it is of fundamental importance to understand the detrimental fluctuations of the superconducting order parameter as the wire width shrinks. In this paper, we use controlled electromigration to narrow down aluminium nanoconstrictions.