Healing Effect of Controlled Anti‐Electromigration on Conventional and High‐Tc Superconducting Nanowires |
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| Authors: | Xavier D A Baumans Joseph Lombardo Jérémy Brisbois Gorky Shaw Vyacheslav S Zharinov Ge He Heshan Yu Jie Yuan Beiyi Zhu Kui Jin Roman B G Kramer Joris Van de Vondel Alejandro V Silhanek |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Experimental Physics of Nanostructured Materials, Q‐MAT, CESAM, Université de Liège, Sart Tilman, Belgium;2. INPAC – Institute for Nanoscale Physics and Chemistry, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Leuven, Belgium;3. Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China;4. Université Grenoble Alpes, Institut NEEL, Grenoble, France;5. CNRS, Institut NEEL, Grenoble, France |
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| Abstract: | The electromigration process has the potential capability to move atoms one by one when properly controlled. It is therefore an appealing tool to tune the cross section of monoatomic compounds with ultimate resolution or, in the case of polyatomic compounds, to change the stoichiometry with the same atomic precision. As demonstrated here, a combination of electromigration and anti‐electromigration can be used to reversibly displace atoms with a high degree of control. This enables a fine adjustment of the superconducting properties of Al weak links, whereas in Nb the diffusion of atoms leads to a more irreversible process. In a superconductor with a complex unit cell (La2?x Cex CuO4), the electromigration process acts selectively on the oxygen atoms with no apparent modification of the structure. This allows to adjust the doping of this compound and switch from a superconducting to an insulating state in a nearly reversible fashion. In addition, the conditions needed to replace feedback controlled electromigration by a simpler technique of electropulsing are discussed. These findings have a direct practical application as a method to explore the dependence of the characteristic parameters on the exact oxygen content and pave the way for a reversible control of local properties of nanowires. |
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| Keywords: | electromigration superconducting nanowires weak links |
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