Research Highlight: Nanostructured Superconductors

1. Research Highlight: Nanostructured Superconductors A superconductor is a material which conducts electricity with no resistance. A nanoscale superconductor has dimensions on the scale of 1/1,000,000,000 meters. We have shown that such small superconductors can be coupled together by a ``nanomechanical oscillator’’ (basically a nanoscale tuning fork). See B. R. Trees, S. Natu, and D. Stroud, Phys. Rev. B72, 214524(2005) Theory of Superconducting and Electromagnetic Properties of Some Nanostructured MaterialsDavid Stroud, Ohio State UniversityNSF DMR-0413395 Above: series of Josephson junctions (small superconducting elements which behave like pendulums) coupled to this nano-tuning fork (indicated as piezoelectric crystal). Below:black curve shows vibrating ``tuning fork” driven by junctions. Amplitude TIME

2. Contributions to Education: Six grad students (Daniel Valdez-Balderas, Ivan Tornes, Kohjiro Kobayashi, Kwangmoo Kim, Vishwesha Guttal), one postdoc (Sung Yong Park), one undergrad REU student (Bryan Chen), another undergrad (Stefan Natu), and sabbatical visitor Brad Trees have contributed to this work. Ivan Tornes is now a staff scientist at Battelle; Park has a postdoc at Northwestern. New course developed: “Introduction to Quantum Computing” based partly on research findings from this work. Notes are available on my web site Theory of Superconducting and Electromagnetic Properties of Some Nanostructured MaterialsDavid Stroud, Ohio State UniversityNSF DMR-0413395 • Some potential applications: • When the Josephson junctions couple together, they can radiate energy. Good source of microwaves for signal processing. • 2. If junctions are really small, they can act like ``quantum bits’’. A quantum bit is a tiny element of a ``quantum computer,’’ which may be much faster than a conventional computer. The nano tuning-forks can couple these quantum bits together to produce a system for carrying out very fast computation.