학술논문

Characterization of Amplification Properties of the Superconducting-Ferromagnetic Transistor
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity IEEE Trans. Appl. Supercond. Applied Superconductivity, IEEE Transactions on. 30(7):1-5 Oct, 2020
Subject
Fields, Waves and Electromagnetics
Engineered Materials, Dielectrics and Plasmas
Junctions
Voltage measurement
Current measurement
Josephson junctions
Superconducting epitaxial layers
Electrical resistance measurement
Josephson effect
superconductivity
superconducting electronics
superconducting-ferromagnetic transistor (SFT)
tunneling effect
Language
ISSN
1051-8223
1558-2515
2378-7074
Abstract
We report on the measurement results of the superconducting-ferromagnetic transistors (SFTs). The devices were made at Northwestern University and Hypres (SeeQC), Inc. (Nevirkovets et al ., 2014; 2015). SFT is a multiterminal device with the SIS′FIFS (or SFIFS′IS) structure (where S, I, and F denote a superconductor, an insulator, and a ferromagnetic material, respectively) exploiting intense quasiparticle injection in order to modify the nonlinear I – V curve of a superconducting tunnel junction. SFT is capable of providing voltage, current, and power amplification while having good input/output isolation. We characterized the devices using different measurement techniques. We measured S parameters of the single- and double-acceptor devices at frequencies up to 5 MHz. Importantly, we confirmed that the isolation between the input and output of the device is quite good. However, the techniques typically employed to characterize semiconductor devices do not allow for revealing the full potential of our low-resistive SFT devices, especially those having two acceptors. In the latter case, we also tested the devices using the battery-powered current sources with floating grounds. Analyzing double-acceptor I – V curves recorded at different levels of injection currents, for an optimal load, we deduced a small-signal voltage gain of 33 and a power gain of 2.4. We suggest that further improvement of the SFT device parameters is possible in optimized devices, so that the device potentially may serve as a preamplifier for readout of output signals of cryogenic detectors and be useful as an element of other superconductor-based circuits. In addition, we used scanning transmission electron microscopy to identify some problems in the fabrication of the devices without any planarization.