Objective
The project goal is to develop and investigate properties of metal-oxide thin film structures on the substrates with surface tilted from the small-index crystallographic planes (tilted-axes substrates, TAS). First results show that such films and structures show superior properties compared with ordinary-oriented metal-oxide thin films, and provide possibilities to overcome many actual problems - anisotropy, high defects density, high frequency limit - that hamper possible implementation of the high-temperature super conducting (HTSC) thin films in cryoelectronics. Unique properties of tilted-axes metal-oxide films allows design of new devices, such as tunable microwave passive elements, transmission lines with internal amplification of the microwave signal, superconducting Josephson junctions for submillimeter wave processing and extremely rapid quantum computing.
The project can be divided into three main tasks:
(i) fabrication of TAS;
(ii) preparation of passive electronic components of metal-oxide thin films, and;
(iii) design and study of new types of HTSC Josephson junctions. Under the first task the tilted-axes substrates will be prepared, their surface will be optimised for the metal-oxide thin film deposition. Bi-crystal substrates for tests of the [100]-tilt type and twist type grain boundaries will be fabricated, and a search for new biepitaxial pairs (substrate-seed layer) will be performed.
The second task will concentrate on microwave metal-oxide thin film properties. Deposition processes will be optimised, and metallization will be implemented to decrease microwave losses. The vicinal-range TAS will be used to obtain high-quality HTSC thin films and ferromagnetic metal-oxide layers will be used to form tunable heterostructures for microwave applications. The intrinsic Josephson effect in the tilted-axes film will be implemented for intrinsic amplification of microwave signal in a transmission line as well as for generation of microwave radiation in resonator up to THz frequencies.
The third task deals with preparation of complicated HTSC heterostructures with formation of Josephson junctions. Preparation processes will be optimised to decrease degradation of the HTSC thin film. The bi-epitaxial Josephson junctions and arrays of [100]-tilt type and of twist type will be prepared for different TAS inclination angles, their DC and microwave properties will be characterised. The sandwich type Josephson junctions with tilted HTSC thin film axes will be fabricated on biepitaxial substrates and their properties will be studied for different film orientation angles.
The results of the project study can be applied for design and fabrication of higher quality microwave passive and active devices to be used for communications, environmental monitoring, ultra-sensitive receivers, ultra-fast computing. The intermediate results of the project can be used to improve the quality of thin films, especially HTSC and other metal-oxide thin films, as well as study of thin film properties. New physical properties of the films and structures are supposed to receive
Call for proposal
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84239 Bratislava
Slovakia