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Electronic properties of low dimensional superconductors are determined by many-body-effects. This physics has been studied traditionally with superconducting thin films and in recent times with two-dimensional electron gases (2DEGs) at oxide interfaces. In this work, we show that a superconducting 2DEG can be generated by simply evaporating a thin layer of metallic Al under ultrahigh vacuum on a SrTiO 3 crystal, whereby Al oxidizes into amorphous insulating alumina, doping the SrTiO 3 surface with oxygen vacancies. The superconducting critical temperature of the resulting 2DEG is found to be tunable with a gate voltage with a maximum value of 360 mK. A gate-induced switching between superconducting and resistive states is demonstrated. Compared to conventionally-used pulsed-laser deposition, our work simplifies to a large extent the process of fabricating oxide-based superconducting 2DEGs. It will make such systems accessible to a broad range of experimental techniques useful to understand low-dimensional phase transitions and complex many-body-phenomena in electronic systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Superconducting nanowires can be fabricated by decomposition of an organometallic gas using a focused beam of Ga ions. However, physical damage and unintentional doping often result from the exposure to the ion beam, motivating the search for a means to achieve similar structures with a beam of electrons instead of ions. This has so far remained an experimental challenge. We report the fabrication of superconducting tungsten nanowires by electron-beam-induced-deposition, with critical temperature of 2.0 K and critical magnetic field of 3.7 T, and compare them with superconducting wires made with ions. This work is an important development for the templatefree realization of nanoscale superconducting devices, without the requirement of an ion beam column. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The elastic response of suspended NbSe3 nanowires is studied across the charge density wave phase transition. The nanoscale dimensions of the resonator lead to a large resonant frequency (∼10-100 MHz), bringing the excited phonon frequency in close proximity of the plasmon mode of the electronic condensate—a parameter window not accessible in bulk systems. The interaction between the phonon and plasmon modes strongly modifies the elastic properties at high frequencies. This is manifested in the nanomechanics of the system as a sharp peak in the temperature dependence of the elastic modulus (relative change of 12.8%) in the charge density wave phase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using graphene resonator, we perform electromechanical measurements in quantum Hall regime to probe the coupling between a quantum Hall (QH) system and its mechanical motion. Mechanically perturbing the QH state through resonance modifies the DC resistance of the system and results in a Fano-lineshape due to electronic interference. Magnetization of the system modifies the resonator's equilibrium position and effective stiffness leading to changes in resonant frequency. Our experiments show that there is an intimate coupling between the quantum Hall state and mechanics-electron transport is affected by physical motion and in turn the magnetization modifies the electromechanical response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this report, we study electromechanical properties of suspended InAs nanowire resonators. At low temperatures, the nanowire acts as the island of a single electron transistor, and a strong coupling between electron transport and mechanical modes is observed for resonant mechanical driving. Further, as a function of the mechanical drive frequency, the conductance exhibits a Fano lineshape. This arises from the interference between two contributions to potential of the single electron transistor coming from capacitively induced charges and the mechanical oscillation. The quality factor (Q) of these devices is ∼105 at 100 mK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a simple fabrication technique for lateral nanowire wrap-gate devices with high capacitive coupling and field-effect mobility. Our process uses e-beam lithography with a single resist-spinning step and does not require chemical etching. We measure, in the temperature range 1.5-250 K, a subthreshold slope of 5-54 mV/decade and mobility of 2800-2500 cm2/Vs-significantly larger than previously reported lateral wrap-gate devices. At depletion, the barrier height due to the gated region is proportional to applied wrap-gate voltage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study field-effect transistors realized from VO2 nanobeams with HfO2 as the gate dielectric. When heated up from low to high temperatures, VO2 undergoes an insulator-to-metal transition. We observe a change in conductance (∼6%) of our devices induced by gate voltage when the system is in the insulating phase. The response is reversible and hysteretic, and the area of hysteresis loop becomes larger as the rate of gate sweep is slowed down. A phase lag exists between the response of the conductance and the gate voltage. This indicates the existence of a memory of the system and we discuss its possible origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The protection against backscattering provided by topology is a striking property. In two-dimensional insulators, a consequence of this topological protection is the ballistic nature of the one-dimensional helical edge states. One demonstration of ballisticity is the quantized Hall conductance. Here we provide another demonstration of ballistic transport, in the way the edge states carry a supercurrent. The system we have investigated is a micrometre-long monocrystalline bismuth nanowire with topological surfaces, that we connect to two superconducting electrodes. We have measured the relation between the Josephson current flowing through the nanowire and the superconducting phase difference at its ends, the current-phase relation. The sharp sawtooth-shaped phase-modulated current-phase relation we find demonstrates that transport occurs selectively along two ballistic edges of the nanowire. In addition, we show that a magnetic field induces 0-π transitions and ϕ0-junction behaviour, providing a way to manipulate the phase of the supercurrent-carrying edge states and generate spin supercurrents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the results of an Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy study on the pristine and doped quasi-one dimensional spin chains cuprates: SrCuO 2 , SrCu 0.99 M 0.01 O 2 with (M = Mg 2+ or Zn 2+ ), Sr 2 CuO 3 and Sr 2 Cu (1-x) Ni x O 3 with (x = 0.01 or 0.02), where the dopant is a non-magnetic impurity. Both systems are quantum critical and obey the Tomonaga-Luttinger spin liquid theory. Due to low dimensionality, the separation of the degrees of freedom of the collective excitation modes of spin and charge occurs, resulting in two distinct band dispersions ascribed to spinon and holon quasi-particles, at a binding energy of about 1.2 eV. Several experimental probes show that the finite size effect, in these strongly correlated electron compounds, resulting from chains breaking by the non-magnetic impurities, has a strong impact on the ground state of their quasi-particles excitations. On the other hand, our Angle Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy data do not show any evolution of the spinon branch upon doping, in terms of energy position at Г. We also extract the antiferromagnetic superexchange coupling and inter-site hopping constants J AF and t . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate proximity-induced superconductivity in micrometer-long bismuth nanowires connected to superconducting electrodes with a high critical field. At low temperature we measure a supercurrent that persists in magnetic fields as high as the critical field of the electrodes (above 11 T). The critical current is also strongly modulated by the magnetic field. In certain samples we find regular, rapid SQUID-like periodic oscillations occurring up to high fields. Other samples exhibit less periodic but full modulations of the critical current on Tesla field scales, with field-caused extinctions of the supercurrent. These findings indicate the existence of low dimensionality, phase coherent, interfering conducting regions through the samples, with a subtle interplay between orbital and spin contributions. We relate these surprising results to the electronic properties of the surface states of bismuth, strong Rashba spin-orbit coupling, large effective g factors, and their effect on the induced pair correlations. In particular, we emphasize the possible contribution of topological edge states of specific facets of the nanowires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the strain state of doubly clamped VO2 nanobeam devices by dynamically probing resonant frequency of the nanoscale electromechanical device across the metal-insulator transition. Simultaneous resistance and resonance measurements indicate M1-M2 phase transition in the insulating state with a drop in resonant frequency concomitant with an increase in resistance. The resonant frequency increases by ~7 MHz with the growth of metallic domain (M2-R transition) due to the development of tensile strain in the nanobeam. Our approach to dynamically track strain coupled with simultaneous resistance and resonance measurements using electromechanical resonators enables the study of lattice-involved interactions more precisely than static strain measurements. This technique can be extended to other phase change systems important for device applications.

We study InAs nanowire resonators fabricated on sapphire substrate with a local gate configuration. The key advantage of using an insulating sapphire substrate is that it results in a reduced parasitic capacitance, thus allowing both wide bandwidth actuation and detection using a network analyzer as well as signal detection at room temperature. Both in-plane and out-of-plane vibrational modes of the nanowire can be driven and the nonlinear response of the resonators studied. In addition, this technique enables the study of variation of thermal strains due to heating in nanostructures.

Two-dimensional electron systems offer enormous opportunities for science discoveries and technological innovations. Here we report a dense electron system on the surface of single-crystal vanadium dioxide nanobeam via electrolyte gating. The overall conductance of the nanobeam increases by nearly 100 times at a gate voltage of 3 V. A series of experiments were carried out which rule out electrochemical reaction, impurity doping, and oxygen vacancy diffusion as the dominant mechanism for the conductance modulation. A surface insulator-to-metal transition is electrostatically triggered, thereby collapsing the bandgap and unleashing an extremely high density of free electrons from the original valence band within a depth self-limited by the energetics of the system. The dense surface electron system can be reversibly tuned by the gating electric field, which provides direct evidence of the electron correlation driving mechanism of the phase transition in VO(2). It also offers a new material platform for implementing Mott transistor and novel sensors and investigating low-dimensional correlated electron behavior.

We use suspended graphene electromechanical resonators to study the variation of resonant frequency as a function of temperature. Measuring the change in frequency resulting from a change in tension, from 300 to 30 K, allows us to extract information about the thermal expansion of monolayer graphene as a function of temperature, which is critical for strain engineering applications. We find that thermal expansion of graphene is negative for all temperatures between 300 and 30 K. We also study the dispersion, the variation of resonant frequency with DC gate voltage, of the electromechanical modes and find considerable tunability of resonant frequency, desirable for applications like mass sensing and RF signal processing at room temperature. With a lowering of temperature, we find that the positively dispersing electromechanical modes evolve into negatively dispersing ones. We quantitatively explain this crossover and discuss optimal electromechanical properties that are desirable for temperature-compensated sensors.