Microwave circulator
AssigneeThe University of Queensland
InventorsThomas Michael Stace, Arkady Fedorov
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A microwave circulator including an integrated circuit and having a number of ports, a respective superconducting ring segment coupled to each port to allow microwave frequency signals to be transferred between the port and the respective ring segment, a superconducting tunnel junction interconnecting each pair of adjacent ring segments to form a circulator ring, wherein the tunnel junctions are configured so that when a bias is applied to the tunnel junctions, signals undergo a phase shift as they traverse the tunnel junctions between ring segments, thereby propagating signals to an adjacent port in a propagation direction and at least one feature to at least partially suppress quasiparticles within the circulator.
Claims11
A microwave circulator including an integrated circuit and having:
- a) a number of ports;
- b) a respective superconducting ring segment coupled to each port to allow microwave frequency signals to be transferred between the port and the respective ring segment;
- c) a superconducting tunnel junction interconnecting each pair of adjacent ring segments to form a circulator ring, wherein the tunnel junctions are configured so that when a bias is applied to the tunnel junctions, signals undergo a phase shift as they traverse the tunnel junctions between ring segments, thereby propagating signals to an adjacent port in a propagation direction;
- and,
- d) at least one feature to at least partially suppress quasiparticles within the circulator, wherein the at least one feature includes trap superconducting material deposited on each of the ring segments.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.