Nanoscale superconductivity, fluxonics and photonics:
Addressing grand challenges

a K.U.Leuven Methusalem Group

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• 16/02/09 Opening of the website

Introduction

The key technologies for the XXI century have been recently identified: energy, transport, nanotechnology, information/communication technology, health care, and environment. For all of them nanosciences are extremely important since electrical, magnetic and optical properties of various condensed matter systems, essential for these technologies, can be controlled practically at will and new functionalities can be created by designing an implementing the proper nanoscale confinement for charges, spins and photons, respectively. The modern nano-revolution is aimed at controlling and mastering the nanoscale confinement for developing new properties and creating novel functionalities.

Research

To enable the emerging technologies, the new superconducting and photonic materials with a superior performance can be developed by manipulating the appropriate “elementary building blocks” through nanostructuring. Such “elementary blocks” are Cooper pair and fluxon for superconductivity and photon and plasmon for photonics/nanoplasmonics. This brings us to the main objectives of the proposed programme:

• to investigate the effect of the nanoscale confinement of the Cooper pairs and flux on superconductivity and flux behaviour in order to enhance the superconducting critical parameters (critical current, field and temperature), through nanostructuring thus enabling novel functionalities and new potential applications of the superconducting materials
• to investigate the optical confinement and plasmonic behaviour in individual nanocells (normal metallic, magnetic, superconducting, semiconducting and hybrid) and in metamaterials formed by the arrays of these nanocells for achieving new optical properties and for merging photonics with electronics at the nanoscale

Along the line of the main objective, the proposed research will be focused on the following topics:

• Evolution of superconductivity at nanoscale: optimizing the confinement of the Cooper pairs.
• Superconductivity and fluxon behaviour in hybrid nanosystems with tunable magnetic templates
• Confined flux in nanostructured single and two-component superconductors
• Vortex manipulation for developing fluxonics devices and superconducting elements for quantum computing
• Nanomodulated plasmonics structures (“photonic wire”) and photonic metamaterials
• Photonics of molecular magnets and quantum dots: photoluminescence, lasing and super-radiance
• Energy harvesting with plasmonics nanostructures for solar cells and other photonics application
• Optical and magnetic nano-markers for bio/med applications

Theoretical modeling will play an essential role in this proposal since the confinement of the condensate and light inside the nanostructured samples can be successfully treated in the framework of the Ginzburg-Landau (and/or Bogolyubov-De Gennes) equations for superconductivity and the Maxwell (and/or time dependent Schrodinger) equations for photonics, with the imposed proper boundary conditions at the nanofabricated boundaries.
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