Controllable Tunneling of Single Flux Quanta Mediated by Quantum Phase Slip in Disordered Superconducting Loops

Formation of Quantum Phase Slip Pairs in Superconducting Nanowires

A. Belkin, M. Belkin, V. Vakaryuk, S. Khlebnikov, and A. Bezryadin Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA American Physical Society, 1 Research Road, Ridge, New York 11961, USA Department of Physics and Astronomy, Purdue University, West Lafayette...

Controllable stepmotors and rectifiers of magnetic flux quanta

We study the transport of vortices in superconductors with square arrays of asymmetric pinning wells when applying an alternating electrical current. This system can induce a net rectifying or diode effect for the vortex motion, including collective stepmotor-type dynamics, where many vortices move forward a controlled and exact number of pin-latticespacings at each cycle of the AC driving forc...

Quantum phase slip phenomenon in ultra-narrow superconducting nanorings

The smaller the system, typically - the higher is the impact of fluctuations. In narrow superconducting wires sufficiently close to the critical temperature T(c) thermal fluctuations are responsible for the experimentally observable finite resistance. Quite recently it became possible to fabricate sub-10 nm superconducting structures, where the finite resistivity was reported within the whole r...

Optical manipulation of single flux quanta

Magnetic field can penetrate into type II superconductors in the form of Abrikosov vortices, which are magnetic flux tubes surrounded by circulating supercurrents often trapped at defects referred to as pinning sites. Although the average properties of the vortex matter in superconductors can be tuned with magnetic fields, temperature or electric currents, handling of individual Abrikosov vorti...

Magnetic Flux Periodicity of h/e in Superconducting Loops