Professor Masaaki Tanaka and his research group have developed a new method for forming nanostructures of the superconductor β-Sn at arbitrary positions in the α-Sn thin film surface in arbitrary shapes and on a nanoscale by applying a focused ion beam to a topological Dirac semimetal(TDS) α-Sn thin film. As a result, the world’s first observation of the superconducting diode effect, in which the superconducting current flows in only one direction when a magnetic field is applied in the direction of the superconducting β-Sn nano-wire structure in TDS α-Sn, was achieved. The new method is expected to be a method to realise various superconducting circuits and error-resistant topological quantum arithmetic circuits, as high-quality nanostructures consisting of superconductor/topological materials can be fabricated at will. The resulting paper was published in the online edition of the British scientific journal Nature Communications on 30 September.
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