Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Multi-terminal Josephson effect
    (2021) Pankratova, Natalia; Manucharyan, Vladimir E; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Conventionally, a Josephson junction is an ubiquitous quantum device formed by a weak link between a pair of superconductors. In this work, we demonstrate the dc Josephson effect in mesoscopic junctions of more than two superconducting terminals. We report fabrication and characterization of the 3- and 4-terminal Josephson junctions built in a top-down fashion from hybrid semiconductor-superconductor InAs/Al epitaxial heterostructures. In general, the critical current of an N-terminal junction is an (N-1)-dimensional hypersurface in the space of bias currents, which can be reduced to a set of critical current contours (CCCs). The CCC is a key ground state characteristic of a multi-terminal Josephson junction, which is readily available from regular electron transport measurements. We investigate nontrivial modifications of the CCC's geometry in response to electrical gating, magnetic field, and phase bias. All observed effects are described by the scattering formulation of the Josephson effect generalized to the case of N>2. Our observations indicate superconducting phase coherence between all the terminals which establishes the Josephson effect in mesoscopic junctions of more than two superconductors. Such multi-terminal junctions could find their applications in a broad range of fields from topologically protected quantum computation to quantum metrology and others.
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    Development of a dual-tip millikelvin Josephson scanning tunneling microscope
    (2014) Roychowdhury, Anita; Lobb, Christopher J; Wellstood, Frederick C; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In this thesis, I first describe the design and construction of a dual-tip millikelvin STM system. The STM is mounted on a dilution refrigerator and the setup includes vibration isolation, rf-filtered wiring, an ultra high vacuum (UHV) sample preparation chamber and sample transfer mechanism.

    Next I describe a novel superconducting tip fabrication technique. My technique involves dry-etching sections of 250 μm diameter Nb wire with an SF6 plasma in a reactive ion etcher. I present data taken with these tips on various samples at temperatures ranging from 30 mK to 9 K. My results demonstrate that the tips are superconducting, achieve good spectroscopic energy resolution, are mechanically robust over long time periods, and are atomically sharp.

    I also show data characterizing the performance of our system. This data is in the form of atomic resolution images, spectroscopy, noise spectra and simultaneous scans taken with both tips of the STM. I used these to examine the tip-sample stability, cross talk between the two tips, and to extract the effective noise temperature (∼185 mK) of the sample by fitting the spectroscopy data to a voltage noise model.

    Finally, I present spectroscopy data taken with a Nb tip on a Nb(100) sample at 30 mK. The enhanced spectroscopic resolution at this temperature allowed me to resolve peaks in the fluctuation-dominated supercurrent at sub-gap voltages. My analysis indicates that these peaks are due to the incoherent tunneling of Cooper pairs at resonant frequencies of the STM's electromagnetic environment. By measuring the response of the STM junction to microwaves, I identified the charge carriers in this regime as Cooper pairs with charge 2e. The amplitude of the response current scales as the square of the Bessel functions, indicating that the pair tunneling originates from photon assisted tunneling in the incoherent regime, rather than the more conventionally observed Shapiro steps in the coherent regime.