Multilayered Heater Nanocryotron: A Superconducting-Nanowire-Based Thermal Switch

Creators: Baghdadi, Reza; Allmaras, Jason P.; Butters, Brenden A.; Dane, Andrew E.; Iqbal, Saleem; McCaughan, Adam N.; Toomey, Emily A.; Zhao, Qing-Yuan; Kozorezov, Alexander G.; Berggren, Karl K.

Abstract

We demonstrate a multilayer nanoscale cryogenic heater-based switch (M-hTron) that uses a normal-metal heater overlapping a thin-film superconductor separated by a thin insulating layer. The M-hTron eliminates leakage current found in three-terminal superconducting switches and applies heat locally to the superconductor, reducing the energy required to switch the device. Modeling using the energy-balance equations and the acoustic mismatch model demonstrates reasonable agreement with experiment. The M-hTron is a promising device for digital superconducting electronics that require high fan-out and offers the possibility of enhancing readout for superconducting-nanowire single-photon detectors.

Additional Information

© 2020 American Physical Society. Received 7 July 2020; revised 19 September 2020; accepted 5 October 2020; published 6 November 2020. We thank Tom Ohki and Andrew Wagner for helpful discussions, Matteo Castellani for verifying the calculations in the paper, and Ilya Chareav and Owen Medeiros for feedback on the manuscript. Additionally, we thank James Daley and Mark Mondol in the NanoStructures Laboratory at MIT for nanofabrication technical support. The initial stages of this work were partly supported by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) via Contract No. W911NF-14-C0089. The later stages of this work were sponsored by the Army Research Office (ARO) and were accomplished under Cooperative Agreement No. W911NF-16-2-0192. J.P.A. was supported by a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship. Part of this research was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. R. Baghdadi and J. P. Allmaras contributed equally to this work.

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