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Physical Review Letters

Fast and Accurate Single-Island Charge Pump: Implementation of a Cooper Pair Pump

A. O. Niskanen, Jukka P Pekola, Heikki Seppä

Published Oct 24, 2003• 75 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We introduce a Cooper pair "sluice" for the implementation of a frequency-locked current source. The device consists of two mesoscopic SQUIDs and of a single superconducting island with a gate. We demonstrate theoretically that it is possible to obtain a current as high as 0.1 nA at better than ppm accuracy via periodically modulating both the gate charge and the effective Josephson coupling. We find that the device is tolerant against background charge noise and operates well even in a dissipative environment. The effect of the imperfect suppression of the Josephson coupling and the finite operating frequency are also investigated.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.91.177003

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In a system where two small-area (100 nm x 100 nm) superconducting tunnel junctions are connected in series, the Josephson effect which tends to impose the phase competes with the charging effects in the central electrode (the of the device) which tend to set the charge of the island. By applying a voltage on an electrode capacitively coupled to the island (the electrode) one can arbitrate this competition in favour of either effect. This is can be seen in particular on the supercurrent which can flow through the junctions : it is modulated periodically by the gate voltage (hence the name of given to the system). This modulation shows sharp peaks when two charge states of the island are degenerate with respect to the electrostatic energy. The system is then in a state which has no classical description : it is in a coherent superposition of states. In this thesis we demonstrate experimentally the behaviour of this transistor and we analyse the theoretical and practical problems which can prevent the observation of the coherent superposition of states through the modulation of the supercurrent. In particular we show that the parity of the electron number in the island must be rigorously controlled and that the impedance connected to the circuit plays a crucial role in setting the magnitude of the measured supercurrent.

•Mar 6, 1995•6 citations
We introduce a Cooper pair "sluice" for the implementation of a frequency-locked current source. The device consists of two mesoscopic SQUIDs and of a single superconducting island with a gate. We demonstrate theoretically that it is possible to obtain a current as high as 0.1 nA at better than ppm accuracy via periodically modulating both the gate charge and the effective Josephson coupling. We find that the device is tolerant against background charge noise and operates well even in a dissipative environment. The effect of the imperfect suppression of the Josephson coupling and the finite operating frequency are also investigated.
We have carried out first measurements on a novel type of a charge pump nicknamed the Cooper pair "sluice". The device is an adiabatic flux-assisted Cooper pair pump consisting of a mesoscopic superconducting island and of two SQUID loops. The operation is based on the periodic manipulation of a single voltage gate and two input coils controlling the magnetic flux through the SQUID loops. Based on theoretical estimates the device is capable of producing as high as 0.1 nA currents at better than 10-accuracy and looks thus like a promising candidate for the current source in completing the quantum measurement triangle. In spite of several nonidealities in our preliminary measurement setup, we have succeeded in verifying the pumping behavior of the sluice. The pumped currents were quite high, several hundred pA, but the accuracy needs to be increased. The results obtained so far suggest various ways of improving the measurement setup
We have experimentally demonstrated pumping of Cooper pairs in a single-island mesoscopic structure. The island was connected to leads through SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device) loops. Synchronized flux and voltage signals were applied whereby the Josephson energies of the SQUIDs and the gate charge were tuned adiabatically. From the current-voltage characteristics one can see that the pumped current increases in 1e1e1e steps which is due to quasiparticle poisoning on the measurement time scale, but we argue that the transport of charge is due to Cooper pairs.
In this work four different mesoscopic superconducting devices have been experimentally studied: an ammeter based on a hysteretic Josephson junction switching from the superconducting state to the normal state, a conventional Cooper pair pump (CPP) based on two superconducting islands separated by tunnel junctions, a novel flux assisted Cooper pair pump and a thermometer based on a tunnel junction between a superconductor and a normal metal. These devices make use of phenomena related to superconductivity and are also benefiting from some properties of small structures, e.g., of quantum mechanical tunneling and of transport of single electrons. The present research focused on investigating performance limitations of these devices and the aim was to improve their performance. A hysteretic Josephson junction switching can be used as a sensitive current threshold detector. For many purposes, a smaller critical current Ic of the detecting junction would yield a higher current sensitivity. It was found in this Thesis that the main limitation of the ammeter is that with increasing sensitivity the negative effects due to dissipation start to dominate. In this Thesis the Josephson junction was also demonstrated as a shot-noise detector, and it was concluded that this kind of a device could probably be made into an absolute on-chip detector of Fano-factors and noise in general. A charge pump is a device which can periodically transfer a discrete amount of charge Q through an electrical circuit. The measured double island CPP introduced a frequency dependent current with a value close to the expected one at low pumping frequencies. The drawback in the measurements was that the direction of the pumped current was set by the bias voltage. The results of the measurement on flux assisted pumping were indeed very promising and the studied device was able to produce sufficiently high pumped currents of around 0.1 nA with reasonable accuracy. Thermometer based on NIS (Normal metal - Insulator - Superconductor) tunnel junctions is a very promising temperature sensor for bolometric radiation sensor applications. This work showed that it can be used as a sensitive thermometer up to MHz frequencies range and that its response time is limited by the electron-phonon scattering rate.
This Thesis studies opportunities to create a quantum standard for the electric current with the help of tunnel junctions. We use two types of tunnel junctions: superconducting Josephson junctions, and NIS junctions where one of the electrodes is normal (N) and the other one superconducting (S). In both cases, tunnel junctions are employed in a single-electron transistor (SET) structure, which is used to transfer a controlled number k of electrons (e) with the repetition frequency f. The magnitude of the resulting current is thus I = kef. First, we study the Cooper pair sluice, where Josephson junctions are connected as two superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUID). A gate electrode is used to control the charge state of the superconducting island formed between the SQUIDs. The sluice is based on tuning the tunneling rates through the SQUIDs with local magnetic fluxes, which allows to control the direction of the charge transfer. Weak traces of current quantization can be observed up to above 1 nA, which is large enough current for many metrological purposes. However, the accuracy of the current is still far from what is required in metrology. We study also a new type of SQUID structure, the balanced SQUID, which could be used to improve the accuracy of the sluice or in, e.g., some quantum computing applications. Second, we employ NIS junctions in the hybrid (SINIS) single-electron transistor with superconducting leads and a normal-metal island. This structure can be used as the SINIS turnstile which lets electrons to flow one by one in the direction determined by the bias voltage. We report the first experimental results on the SINIS turnstile and two methods to improve the accuracy of the current: increasing the charging energy of the island or connecting the turnstile in a resistive environment. We also show that the SINIS turnstile can be used as an electronic radio-frequency refrigerator where tunneling processes cool the electron temperature of the normal-metal island.
In adiabatic Cooper pair pumps, which are operated by means of gate voltage modulation only, the quantization of the pumped charge during a cycle is limited due to the quantum coherence of the macroscopic superconducting wave function. In this work, we show that it is possible to obtain very accurate pumps in the nonadiabatic regime by a suitable choice of the shape of the gate voltage pulses. We determine the shape of these pulses by applying quantum optimal control theory to this problem. In the optimal case, the error, with respect to the quantized value, can be of the order of ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}6}e$, i.e., reduced by up to 5 orders of magnitude with respect to the adiabatic pumping. In order to test the experimental feasibility of this approach, we consider the effect of charge noise and the deformations of the optimal pulse shapes on the accuracy of the pump. Charge noise is assumed to be induced by random background charges in the substrate, which is responsible for the observed 1/f1/f1/f noise. Inaccuracies in the pulse shaping are described by assuming a finite bandwidth for the pulse generator. In realistic cases, the error increases to 1 order of magnitude at most as compared to that of the optimal case. Our results are promising for the realization of accurate and fast superconducting pumps.
In a system where two small-area (100 nm x 100 nm) superconducting tunnel junctions are connected in series, the Josephson effect which tends to impose the phase competes with the charging effects in the central electrode (the of the device) which tend to set the charge of the island. By applying a voltage on an electrode capacitively coupled to the island (the electrode) one can arbitrate this competition in favour of either effect. This is can be seen in particular on the supercurrent which can flow through the junctions : it is modulated periodically by the gate voltage (hence the name of given to the system). This modulation shows sharp peaks when two charge states of the island are degenerate with respect to the electrostatic energy. The system is then in a state which has no classical description : it is in a coherent superposition of states. In this thesis we demonstrate experimentally the behaviour of this transistor and we analyse the theoretical and practical problems which can prevent the observation of the coherent superposition of states through the modulation of the supercurrent. In particular we show that the parity of the electron number in the island must be rigorously controlled and that the impedance connected to the circuit plays a crucial role in setting the magnitude of the measured supercurrent.