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Anaïs Francheteau

Superconducting silicon on insulator and silicide-based superconducting MOSFET for quantum technologies

Published on 18 December 2017
Thesis presented December 18, 2017

Abstract:
Superconducting transport through a silicon MOSFET can open up many new possibilities ranging from fundamental research to industrial applications. In this thesis, we investigate the electric transport properties of a MOSFET built with superconducting source and drain contacts. Due to their advantages in terms of scalability and reproducibility, we want to integrate superconducting materials compatible with CMOS technology, thus exploiting the reliable and mature silicon technology. The idea is to realize a new type of superconducting circuits in a transistor geometry in which a non-dissipative supercurrent flowing through the device from source to drain will be modulated by a gate: a JOFET. One important outcome is the realization of superconducting qubits in a perfectly reproducible and mature technology. However, at low temperature and with the reduction of the size of the devices, two antagonistic phenomena appear. The dissipation-free transport of Cooper pairs competes with lossy single-particle processes due to Coulomb interactions. The goal is to understand how these two conflicting properties manifest in such hybrid devices. In this thesis, I studied two different ways of introducing superconductivity in the devices. We deployed a high boron doping and a laser annealing provided by well-controlled out-of-equilibrium doping techniques to make the silicon superconducting. Although highly boron-doped silicon has been known to be superconducting since 2006, superconductivity of SOI, the basic brick of some transistors, was never tested before. We aim at adapting those doping techniques on SOI in order to make it superconducting and to integrate it in transistor-like devices. In a second project, we study source and drain contacts fabricated with superconducting silicides such as PtSi. Such Schottky barrier MOSFETs with superconducting PtSi contacts are elaborated at the CEA/LETI. Measurements at very low temperature revealed the competition between superconductivity and Coulomb interactions and moreover, have brought evidence of superconductivity in PtSi based silicon Schottky barrier MOSFET.

Keywords:
Superconductivity, Silicon technlology, Low temperature, Quantum technologies, Silicide, Schottky barrier MOSFET

On-line thesis.