Superconducting Memristors

Abstract

In his original work Josephson predicted that a phase-dependent conductance should be present in superconducting tunnel junctions, an effect difficult to detect, mainly because it is hard to single it out from the usual non-dissipative Josephson current. We propose a solution for this problem that consists in using different superconducting materials to realize the two junctions of a superconducting interferometer. According to the Ambegaokar-Baratoff relation the two junctions have different conductances if the critical currents are equal, thus the Josephson current can be suppressed by fixing the magnetic flux in the loop at half of a flux quantum without cancelling the phase-dependent conductance. Our proposal can be used to study the phase-dependent conductance, an effect present in principle in all superconducting weak links. From the standpoint of nonlinear circuit theory such a device is in fact an ideal memristor with possible applications to memories and neuromorphic computing in the framework of ultrafast and low energy consumption superconducting digital circuits.

10 pages, 6 figures, final version published on Physical Review Applied

References in corpus (8)

• Superconducting Circuits and Quantum Information
• Memory effects in complex materials and nanoscale systems
• Memcomputing: a computing paradigm to store and process information on the same physical platform
• Quasiparticle relaxation of superconducting qubits in the presence of flux
• Energy decay and frequency shift of a superconducting qubit from non-equilibrium quasiparticles
• Kinetics of quasiparticle trapping in a Cooper-pair box
• The effect of normal metal layers in ferromagnetic Josephson junctions
• Suppression of the critical current of a balanced SQUID

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