Voltage-Gated Hybrid Ferroelectric-Superconductive Quantum Devices

The increasing demand for data storage and manipulation urges technological developments outside the silicon arena. Superconductors are promising for enabling low-power and quantum computing that addresses the data-consumption growth. A prominent advantage of these materials is the lack of dc electric resistance, which in turn allows zero-energy loss while transmitting electric currents. Nevertheless, following Ohm’s law, the lack of resistance makes voltage biasing impossible. Thus, as opposed to voltage-gated semiconducting transistors, superconducting devices are operated with magnetic fields and RF signals, imposing large device footprint and hence hindering device miniaturization and high-density scaling. Here, we used a ferroelectric-superconducting bilayer to demonstrate voltage-gated superconducting quantum devices. Films, wires and superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) were fabricated and characterized. The ferroelectric polarization was used to produce controllable surface charge at the bilayer interface, which in turn induced changes in the quantum properties, including 54% change in the device switching current. Thus, non-volatile voltage-tunable memory hybrid quantum devices were introduced.