Optical Manipulation of Single Flux Quanta

Abstract

Magnetic field can penetrate into type-II superconductors in the form of Abrikosov vortices, which are magnetic flux tubes surrounded by circulating supercurrents often trapped at defects referred to as pinning sites. Although the average properties of the vortex matter can be tuned with magnetic fields, temperature or electric currents, handling of individual vortices remains challenging and has been demonstrated only with sophisticated magnetic force, superconducting quantum interference device or strain-induced scanning local probe microscopies. Here, we introduce a far-field optical method based on local heating of the superconductor with a focused laser beam to realize a fast, precise and non-invasive manipulation of individual Abrikosov vortices, in the same way as with optical tweezers. This simple approach provides the perfect basis for sculpting the magnetic flux profile in superconducting devices like a vortex lens or a vortex cleaner, without resorting to static pinning or ratchet effects. Since a single vortex can induce a Josephson phase shift, our method also paves the way to fast optical drive of Josephson junctions, with potential massive parallelization of operations.

References in corpus (2)

• Mechanics of Individual, Isolated Vortices in a Cuprate Superconductor
• Controlled Manipulation of Individual Vortices in a Superconductor

Cited by in corpus (5)

• A High-Resolution Combined Scanning Laser- and Widefield Polarizing Microscope for Imaging at Temperatures from 4 K to 300 K
• In-situ creation and control of Josephson junctions with a laser beam
• Finite temperature effects on Majorana bound states in chiral $p$-wave superconductors
• The importance of thermal gradients on the vortex dynamics and magnetic behavior of mesoscopic superconducting samples
• Laser pulse probe of chirality of Cooper pairs