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IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity

A new superconducting device with transistor-like properties

Giovanni Piero Pepe, L. Parlato, Giuseppe Ammendola, E. Esposito, G. Peluso, Alberto C. Barone, N. E. Booth

Published Mar 1, 2001• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A superconducting transistor with large current gain and bandwidth at low temperatures would have many applications. We have fabricated and tested a new three-terminal superconducting device with transistor-like properties at an operating temperature of 4.2 K. It is based on a stacked double tunnel junction structure where the intermediate film is a bilayer of superconducting Nb and an Al quasiparticle trap which can work either in the superconducting or in the normal metal state. Current amplification factors of up to 2.0 are observed at a temperature of 4.2 K when the Al is superconducting, while large current gains of more than 50 are observed when the Al is in the normal state. The device shows a high degree of unidirectionality. The results can be explained on the basis of the recently proposed QUAsiparticle TRApping TRANsistor, which should have wide applications in detection systems operating at low temperatures.

DOI
10.1109/77.919320

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A superconducting transistor with large current gain and bandwidth at low temperatures would have many applications. We have fabricated and tested a new three-terminal superconducting device with transistor-like properties at an operating temperature of 4.2 K. It is based on a stacked double tunnel junction structure where the intermediate film is a bilayer of superconducting Nb and an Al quasiparticle trap which can work either in the superconducting or in the normal metal state. Current amplification factors of up to 2.0 are observed at a temperature of 4.2 K when the Al is superconducting, while large current gains of more than 50 are observed when the Al is in the normal state. The device shows a high degree of unidirectionality. The results can be explained on the basis of the recently proposed QUAsiparticle TRApping TRANsistor, which should have wide applications in detection systems operating at low temperatures.
Interest in superconducting transistors is due to some potential benefits of these devices, such as the possibility to have large current gain and bandwidth at low temperatures. In this work we present experimental results concerning with a new superconducting 3-terminal device showing true transistor-like properties at T=4.2K. It is a stacked double tunnel junction structure where the intermediate film is a bilayer of superconducting Nb with an Al quasiparticle trap which can be either in the superconducting or in the normal metal state. Current amplification factors of up to 2.0 are observed at a temperature of 4.2 K when the Al is superconducting. When the Al is in the normal state, large current gains of more than 50 are observed. The operation is highly directional, i.e. practically no effect is observed when the roles of the injector and detector junctions are reversed. The results are explained according to the recently proposed QUAsiparticle TRApping TRANnsistor model.
We have fabricated and studied a stacked superconducting double tunnel junction device with transistor-like properties. The intermediate electrode is a bilayer consisting of a Nb film together with an Al film that acts as a quasiparticle trap. Large current gains of more than 50 are observed at 4.2 K when the Al layer is normal. The operation is highly directional. Results are explained on the basis of trapping of quasiparticles from a superconductor into a normal metal, together with a conversion of relaxation energy into electronic excitations. Similar devices should have wide applications in low-temperature measurement and detection systems.
We have fabricated and characterized double-barrier multi-terminal superconducting transistor-like devices with the Nb/Al/AlOx/Al/Nb/Ni/Al/AlOx/Al/Nb (S1IS2FIS3) structure, where S, I, and F refer to superconducting, insulating, and ferromagnetic layers, respectively. A thin ferromagnetic Ni layer screens the superconductivity of the middle Nb layer on the injector-barrier side, so that the Nb/Ni bilayer manifests itself as a superconductor in the current-voltage characteristic (I-V curve) of the acceptor S1IS2junction, but as a normal metal in the I-V curve of the injector S2FIS3junction. It is shown that this property allows for considerable improvement of the input-output isolation of the quasiparticle-injection devices as compared with that for the formerly reported quiteron.
A Josephson tunnel junction transistor based on quasiparticle injection is proposed. Its operation relies on the manipulation of the electron distribution in one of the junction electrodes. This is accomplished by injecting quasiparticle current through the junction electrode by two additional tunnel-coupled superconductors. Both large supercurrent enhancement and fast quenching can be achieved with respect to equilibrium by varying quasiparticle injection for proper temperature regimes and suitable superconductor combinations. Combined with large power gain, this makes the device attractive for applications where reduced noise and low-power dissipation are required.
Transistors are invariably made of semiconducting materials, but the special properties of superconducting materials make them attractive for some, highly demanding, applications Indeed, physicists have been trying to build superconducting devices with transistor-like properties – in particular devices that can amplify electrical currents – for more than 20 years. Now Giampiero Pepe of the University of Naples in Italy and colleagues led by Antonio Barone, together with Norman Booth of Oxford University in the UK, have built a superconducting device that exhibits large current amplification and other transistor-like properties (G P Pepe et al. 2000 Appl. Phys. Lett. at press). The device can also he operated to obtain negative current gain, which is not possible with semiconductor devices.
Nb/Al–AlOx–Nb/Al–AlOx–Nb double-barrier three-terminal Josephson devices with a thin middle Nb/Al bilayer, which have potential for use as switching and amplifying elements in superconducting electronics, have been investigated in the stationary state by means of low-temperature scanning electron microscopy. For the devices with lateral sizes comparable with the effective Josephson penetration depth, we observed nearly homogeneous current distribution over the region common to the top and bottom junctions when the devices were biased across both the barriers in the absence of an external magnetic field. When the two junctions are biased separately, the current is concentrated at the junction edges in accordance with the behavior characteristic of distributed junctions. In an applied magnetic field, the vortex structure is confined to the area shared by both junctions when the device is biased as a whole. The experiment gives an indication that in the stationary state the spatial phase difference distribution of the two junctions coincides in the shared region at least in some interval of the external magnetic field.