Nano-Engineered High-Temperature Superconducting Materials and Hybrid Systems for Energy-Efficient Functional Devices

High-temperature superconductors (HTS), combined with other functional materials offer unique opportunities to tune their physical properties with multiple external inputs, thus providing the basis for realizing energy-efficient electronic devices for information and communication technologies (sensors, logic and memory devices, filters antennas).<br/>In spite of great technological advancements in the recent years, electronic devices based on HTS are still in the early stage with respect to those based on conventional low-temperature superconductors. An important drawback is their complexity and high sensitivity on doping which imposes extreme demands on the micro-, nano-fabrication.<br/>In this talk, I will present different strategies to design nanostructured high temperature YBa₂Cu₃O_7-x (YBCO) superconducting films, with local reversible carrier density modulation through field-induced oxygen migration [1]. We demonstrate that non-volatile volume metal-insulating phase transitions can be locally modulated to generate transistor-like devices with free-resistance channels, or create reconfigurable pinning landscapes for fluxtronic device applications. Moreover, I will show that by combining YBCO with ferromagnetic structures in hybrid systems, one can manipulate magnetic textures, through superconducting stray fields or transport super-currents. Multiple volatile and non-volatile magnetic states with different magnetoresistance signal can be stabilized at remanence, and modified by applying small loss-less magnetic fields or currents. The proposed approaches open up new venues for energy-efficient information storage and manipulation [2].<br/>[1] Gonzalez-Rosillo et al. Small 2001307 (2020), Marinkovíc et al. ACS Nano, 14, 11765 (2020), Palau et al. ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 10, 30531(2018).<br/>[2] Alcalà et al. <i>Surfaces and interfaces of metal oxide thin films</i>, multilayers nanoparticles and nanocomposites. Springer Nature Book, ed. By A. Gómez et al. Chapt. 6. 167-182 (2021); Rouco et al. Sci. Rep. 7, 5663 (2017); A. Palau et al. Adv. Sci. 3,1600207 (2016)