News

April 2022

3D-printed Dual Beam plus a micro-manipulator

José María De Teresa's research group has fabricated a DualBeam with micro-manipulator using a 3D-printer. The model illustrates the angle of 52 degrees between the electron beam and the ion beam and the position of the micro-manipulator.

Review paper in Nanomaterials published

On the 15th, Nanomaterials published a review paper named Superconducting Materials and Devices Grown by Focused Ion and Electron Beam Induced Deposition.  In this review, the fundamentals of these nanofabrication techniques are presented, followed by a literature revision on the published work that makes use of them to grow superconducting materials, the most remarkable of which are based on tungsten, niobium, molybdenum, carbon, and lead. Several examples of the application of these materials to functional devices are presented, related to the superconducting proximity effect, vortex dynamics, electric-field effect, and to the nanofabrication of Josephson junctions and nanoSQUIDs. Owing to the patterning flexibility they offer, both of these techniques represent a powerful and convenient approach towards both fundamental and applied research in superconductivity.

March 2022

SQUID-on-lever paper published

On the 1st, Physical Review Applied published our article describing a new type of scanning probe, which we have developed, based on a nanometer-scale superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID). The work is entitled, Magnetic, thermal, and topographic imaging with a nanometer-scale SQUID-on-lever scanning probe. In the paper, we demonstrate a scanning probe that combines the magnetic and thermal imaging provided by an on-tip SQUID with the tip-sample distance control and topographic contrast of a noncontact atomic force microscope (AFM). We pattern the nanometer-scale SQUID, including its weak-link Josephson junctions, via focused-ion-beam milling at the apex of a cantilever coated with Nb, yielding a sensor with an effective diameter of 365 nm, field sensitivity of 9.5 nT/√Hz, and thermal sensitivity of 620 nK/√Hz, operating in magnetic fields up to 1.0 T. The resulting SQUID-on-lever probe is a robust AFM-like scanning probe that expands the reach of sensitive nanometer-scale magnetic and thermal imaging beyond what is currently possible.

From the 4th to the 5th the first annual meeting of the FET-Open collaboration was held in Basel at the Department Physics. This collaboration aims to enable a new era in scanning probe microscopy, in which nanometer-scale sensing devices – specifically superconducting devices – can be directly patterned on-tip and used to reveal new types of contrast. The meeting included a program of talks, a dinner, and plenty of time for discussion. Special thanks to Kousik Bagani and Claudia Wirth for helping with the organization.