Ion-beam assisted sputtering of titanium nitride thin films.

Titanium nitride is a material of interest for many superconducting devices such as nanowire microwave resonators and photon detectors. Thus, controlling the growth of TiN thin films with desirable properties is of high importance. This work aims to explore effects in ion beam-assisted sputtering (IBAS), were an observed increase in nominal critical temperature and upper critical fields are in tandem with previous work on Niobium nitride (NbN).

Coulomb barrier creation by means of electronic field emission in nanolayer capacitors.

The main mechanism of energy loss in capacitors with nanoscale dielectric films is leakage currents. Using the example of Al-AlO-Al, we show that there are two main contributions, namely the cold field emission effect and the hopping conductivity through the dielectric. Our main finding is that an application of a high electric field, ∼0.