Due to stringent thermal budgets in cryogenic technologies such as superconducting quantum computers and sensors, minimizing the energy dissipation and power consumption of cryogenic electronic components is pivotal for large-scale devices. However, electronic building blocks that simultaneously offer low energy consumption, fast switching, low error rates, a small footprint and simple fabrication remain elusive. In this work, we demonstrate a superconducting switch with attojoule switching energy, high speed (pico-second rise/fall times), and high integration density (on the order of 10−2μm2 per switch). The switch consists of a superconducting channel and a metal heater separated by an insulating silica layer, prepared using lift-off techniques. We experimentally demonstrate digital gate operations utilizing this technology, such as NOT, NAND, NOR, AND, and OR gates, with a few femtojoule energy consumption and ultralow bit error rates < 10−8. In addition, we build volatile memory elements with few femtojoule energy consumption per operation, a nanosecond operation speed, and a retention time over 105 s. These superconducting switches open new possibilities for increasing the size and complexity of modern cryogenic technologies.
@article{arxiv.2407.07552,
title = {Attojoule superconducting thermal logic and memories},
author = {Hui Wang and Niels Noordzij and Stephan Steinhauer and Thomas Descamps and Eitan Oksenberg and Val Zwiller and Iman Esmaeil Zadeh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.07552},
year = {2025}
}