Superconducting tunneling spectroscopy of low-dimensional materials

Damasco, John Jeffrey

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/104746 Copy

Description

Title

Superconducting tunneling spectroscopy of low-dimensional materials

Author(s)

Damasco, John Jeffrey

Issue Date

2019-02-13

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Mason, Nadya

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Abbamonte, Peter

Committee Member(s)

• Clark, Bryan
• Faulkner, Thomas

Department of Study

Physics

Discipline

Physics

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Nanofabrication
• graphene
• carbon
• superconductivity
• tunnel probe
• tunnel junction
• InSb
• III-V
• semiconductor
• Fabry-Perot
• quantized conductance
• Majorana mode
• Andreev bound state
• thin films
• manganite
• bismuth

Abstract

Due to technological advances in bottom-up and top-down approaches in device fabrication, scientists have been able to construct devices that have dimensions on the orders of ones or tens of nanometers. Low-dimensional materials are of great interest due to the emergence of quantum effects and increased interactions between electrons, which can be exploited to create novel electronic devices. In this thesis, transport was studied in a variety of one- and two-dimensional materials. In graphene, non-equilibrium tunneling spectroscopy was used to show that phonon-electron interactions was the mechanism to cool electrons. For InSb nanowires, a method of fabricating clean, ordered metallic contacts was found and was extended to create superconducting tunnel probes for the purpose of performing superconducting tunneling spectroscopy. Non-equilibrium tunneling spectroscopy to demonstrate the quality of the superconducting tunneling probes and further experimentation led to the discovery of ideal fabrication parameters. Nanowires of La2/3Sr1/3MnO3 were measured to observe the domain-dominated physics observed in other similar colossal magnetoresistive materials, which manifests as multi-level noise. One of the first magnetoresistive measurements of ultrathin films of bismuth and bismuth-antimony are also presented, and it is shown that there are transport signatures consistent with the quantum size effect.

Graduation Semester

2019-05

Type of Resource

text

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/104746

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2019 John Jeffrey Damasco

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