Superconducting Electronics and Detectors Workshop

 

Superconducting Electronics and Detectors Workshop
December 1-3, 2015
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
Newport News, VA

Remote Participation

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Circular

This is the first workshop held at Jefferson Laboratory about superconducting electronics and detectors.

Superconductors have always held many promises in terms of power savings with the advent of superconducting cavities andsuperconducting magnets. Since superconductivity is based on loosely bound Cooper pairs, some of the best energy resolutions have been achieved with superconducting detectors such has Transistion Edge Sensors and Superconducting Tunnel Junction. The best measurement of magnetic fields were also achieve using Josephson Junctions in Single Quantum Interferometer Devices. Nevertheless even though very sensitive those detectors are not commonly used in JLab experiments because their response time is usually slow. Since about 10 years superconducting nanowire photodetectors (SNPD) which consists thin strips about 10 nm wide and 100 nm long and a few nanometers thick layer of superconductor. Those detector can have pulse shorter than a nanosecond and efficiencies above 90 % for single photon detections. The main drawback of this kind of detectors is the size of the order of 100 nm leading to a very large amount of channels. Built in superconducting electronics could alleviate this problem by processing a large number of units and sending the relevant computed quantity to the outside world making the transition from cryogenics to outside smoother. Jefferson Laboratory with its expertise in cryogenics and superconducting thin films has the potential to produce and use such detectors for very high rate experiments.

Main topics / questions:

  • Superconducting detectors technologies (SQUID, MKID, TES and STJ) with an emphasis on the superconducting nanowire technique
  • Superconducting electronics based on Rapid Single Flux Quantum technology
  • Picosecond measurements
  • Facilities working on superconducting detectors
  • High density arrays of superconducting detectors with built in electronics
  • Possible applications of those detectors at JLab in other fields
  • Properties of superconductors for detector and electronics productions : Nb, NbN, NbTiN, MgB2,WSi, YBaCuO and other
  • Lithography techniques for mass production and evaluation of fabrication and operation costs
  • Superconducting detectors operated in magnetic fields

 

This workshop will bring together specialists in superconducting detectors and electronics and we will have several discussion sessions (about third of the time ) to try to address major questions for these topics.