Brown University Professor of Engineering and Physics Alex Zaslavsky and Physics Professor Gang Xiao, together with Distinguished Senior Engineer Bill Patterson and colleagues at Tufts and CoolCAD Electronics, have been awarded funds from the Army Research Office toward the development of a novel cryogenic camera, an indispensable asset for characterizing superconducting films and circuits.
The grant titled, “Cryogenic magnetic camera that captures real-time trapped flux vortex dynamics in superconducting electronics,” is worth more than $3.4 million over four years.
Scaling up superconducting electronics circuitry to very-large-scale integration (VLSI) levels has historically been constrained by trapped flux vortices in superconducting layers as they are cooled through the critical temperature in a weak residual magnetic field. These trapped vortices impact the circuit margins and, in the worst case, completely disrupt functionality. Existing mitigation schemes are only partially successful and are based on intuition, rather than quantitative understanding.
The group proposes to leverage current magnetic field-sensing work with a redesign of the magnetic camera, optimized for measuring flux vortex dynamics. The final goal is a cryogenic magnetic camera prototype optimized for real-time nondestructive magnetic flux motion imaging in superconducting circuits.