RESUMEN
High-entropy alloys (HEA) form through the random arrangement of five or more chemical elements on a crystalline lattice. Despite the significant amount of resulting compositional disorder, a subset of HEAs enters a superconducting state below critical temperatures, [Formula: see text] K. The superconducting properties of the known HEAs seem to suffice a Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) description, but little is known about their superconducting order parameter and the microscopic role of disorder. We report on magnetic susceptibility measurements on films of the superconducting HEA (TaNb)[Formula: see text](ZrHfTi)[Formula: see text] for characterizing the lower and upper critical fields [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], respectively as a function of temperature T. Our resulting analysis of the Ginzburg-Landau coherence length and penetration depth demonstrates that HEAs of this type are single-band isotropic s-wave superconductors in the dirty limit. Despite a significant difference in the elemental composition between the [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] films, we find that the observed [Formula: see text] variations cannot be explained by disorder effects.
RESUMEN
The superconducting transmon qubit is a leading platform for quantum computing and quantum science. Building large, useful quantum systems based on transmon qubits will require significant improvements in qubit relaxation and coherence times, which are orders of magnitude shorter than limits imposed by bulk properties of the constituent materials. This indicates that relaxation likely originates from uncontrolled surfaces, interfaces, and contaminants. Previous efforts to improve qubit lifetimes have focused primarily on designs that minimize contributions from surfaces. However, significant improvements in the lifetime of two-dimensional transmon qubits have remained elusive for several years. Here, we fabricate two-dimensional transmon qubits that have both lifetimes and coherence times with dynamical decoupling exceeding 0.3 milliseconds by replacing niobium with tantalum in the device. We have observed increased lifetimes for seventeen devices, indicating that these material improvements are robust, paving the way for higher gate fidelities in multi-qubit processors.
RESUMEN
The boundary modes of topological insulators are protected by the symmetries of the nontrivial bulk electronic states. Unless these symmetries are broken, they can give rise to novel phenomena, such as the quantum spin Hall effect in one-dimensional (1D) topological edge states, where quasiparticle backscattering is suppressed by time-reversal symmetry (TRS). Here, we investigate the properties of the 1D topological edge state of bismuth in the absence of TRS, where backscattering is predicted to occur. Using spectroscopic imaging and spin-polarized measurements with a scanning tunneling microscope, we compared quasiparticle interference (QPI) occurring in the edge state of a pristine bismuth bilayer with that occurring in the edge state of a bilayer, which is terminated by ferromagnetic iron clusters that break TRS. Our experiments on the decorated bilayer edge reveal an additional QPI branch, which can be associated with spin-flip scattering across the Brioullin zone center between time-reversal band partners. The observed QPI characteristics exactly match with theoretical expectations for a topological edge state, having one Kramer's pair of bands. Together, our results provide further evidence for the nontrivial nature of bismuth and in particular, demonstrate backscattering inside a helical topological edge state induced by broken TRS through local magnetism.
RESUMEN
We examine the spectroscopic signatures of tunneling through a Kitaev quantum spin liquid (QSL) barrier in a number of experimentally relevant geometries. We combine contributions from elastic and inelastic tunneling processes and find that spin-flip scattering at the itinerant spinon modes gives rise to a gapped contribution to the tunneling conductance spectrum. We address the spectral modifications that arise in a magnetic field, which is applied to drive the candidate material α-RuCl_{3} into a QSL phase, and we propose a lateral 1D tunnel junction as a viable setup in this regime. The characteristic spin gap is an unambiguous signature of the fractionalized QSL excitations, distinguishing it from magnons or phonons. We discuss the generalization of our results to a wide variety of QSLs with gapped and gapless spin correlators.
RESUMEN
The discovery of superconducting and insulating states in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG)1,2 has ignited considerable interest in understanding the nature of electronic interactions in this chemically pristine material. The transport properties of MATBG as a function of doping are similar to those of high-transition-temperature copper oxides and other unconventional superconductors1-3, which suggests that MATBG may be a highly interacting system. However, to our knowledge, there is no direct experimental evidence of strong many-body correlations in MATBG. Here we present high-resolution spectroscopic measurements, obtained using a scanning tunnelling microscope, that provide such evidence as a function of carrier density. MATBG displays unusual spectroscopic characteristics that can be attributed to electron-electron interactions over a wide range of doping levels, including those at which superconductivity emerges in this system. We show that our measurements cannot be explained with a mean-field approach for modelling electron-electron interactions in MATBG. The breakdown of a mean-field approach when applied to other correlated superconductors, such as copper oxides, has long inspired the study of the highly correlated Hubbard model3. We show that a phenomenological extended-Hubbard-model cluster calculation, which is motivated by the nearly localized nature of the relevant electronic states of MATBG, produces spectroscopic features that are similar to those that we observed experimentally. Our findings demonstrate the critical role of many-body correlations in understanding the properties of MATBG.
RESUMEN
Superconducting proximity pairing in helical edge modes, such as those of topological insulators, is predicted to provide a unique platform for realizing Majorana zero modes (MZMs). We used scanning tunneling microscopy measurements to probe the influence of proximity-induced superconductivity and magnetism on the helical hinge states of bismuth(111) films grown on a superconducting niobium substrate and decorated with magnetic iron clusters. Consistent with model calculations, our measurements revealed the emergence of a localized MZM at the interface between the superconducting helical edge channel and the iron clusters, with a strong magnetization component along the edge. Our experiments also resolve the MZM's spin signature, which distinguishes it from trivial in-gap states that may accidentally occur at zero energy in a superconductor.
RESUMEN
We have investigated the phase dynamics of a superconducting tunnel junction at ultralow temperatures in the presence of high damping, where the interaction with environmental degrees of freedom represents the leading energy scale. In this regime, theory predicts the dynamics to follow a generalization of the classical Smoluchowski description, the quantum Smoluchowski equation, thus, exhibiting overdamped quantum Brownian motion characteristics. For this purpose, we have performed current-biased measurements on the small-capacitance Josephson junction of a scanning tunneling microscope placed in a low impedance environment at milli-Kelvin temperatures. We can describe our experimental findings with high accuracy by using a quantum phase diffusion model based on the quantum Smoluchowski equation. In this way we experimentally demonstrate that overdamped quantum systems follow quasiclassical dynamics with significant quantum effects as the leading corrections.
RESUMEN
The tunnelling current in scanning tunnelling spectroscopy (STS) is typically and often implicitly modelled by a continuous and homogeneous charge flow. If the charging energy of a single-charge quantum sufficiently exceeds the thermal energy, however, the granularity of the current becomes non-negligible. In this quantum limit, the capacitance of the tunnel junction mediates an interaction of the tunnelling electrons with the surrounding electromagnetic environment and becomes a source of noise itself, which cannot be neglected in STS. Using a scanning tunnelling microscope operating at 15 mK, we show that we operate in this quantum limit, which determines the ultimate energy resolution in STS. The P(E)-theory describes the probability for a tunnelling electron to exchange energy with the environment and can be regarded as the energy resolution function. We experimentally demonstrate this effect with a superconducting aluminium tip and a superconducting aluminium sample, where it is most pronounced.
RESUMEN
Probing absolute values of spin polarization at the nanoscale offers insight into the fundamental mechanisms of spin-dependent transport. Employing the Zeeman splitting in superconducting tips (Meservey-Tedrow-Fulde effect), we introduce a novel spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy that combines the probing capability of the absolute values of spin polarization with precise control at the atomic scale. We utilize our novel approach to measure the locally resolved spin polarization of magnetic Co nanoislands on Cu(111). We find that the spin polarization is enhanced by 65% when increasing the width of the tunnel barrier by only 2.3 Å due to the different decay of the electron orbitals into vacuum.
