The first systematic studies of terahertz electrodynamic properties of Mo0.6Re0.4 films of thicknesses ranging from 10 nm to 100 nm and corresponding critical temperatures from 6.5K to 9.5K are performed.

Although our thinnest films have slightly smaller values of the critical temperature than those obtained earlier, the values of Tc(d) are still higher than the critical temperatures of the alloys MoSi, MoGe, WSi, NbSi. This makes MoRe alloy a perspective material for the design of elements and devices of advanced electronics and optoelectronics, for example, single-photon detectors, high-Q resonators for frequency locking systems, etc.

We have studied the Thouless energy in Josephson superconductor – normal metal – superconductor (SN-N-NS) bridges analytically and numerically, considering the influence of the sub-electrode regions. We have discovered a significant suppression of the Thouless energy with increasing interfacial resistance, consistent with experimental results.

The analysis of the temperature dependence of the critical current in Josephson junctions in comparison with the expressions for the Thouless energy may allow the determination of the interface parameters of S and N-layers.

It is well-known that the cornerstone of the proximity effect in superconductor/ferromagnet heterostructures is a generation of triplet Cooper pairs from singlet Cooper pairs inherent in a conventional superconductor. This proximity effect brought a lot of new exciting physics and gave a powerful impulse to development of superconducting spintronics.

Nowadays a new direction of spintronics is actively developing, which is based on antiferromagnets and their heterostructures. It is called antiferromagnetic spintronics. By analogy with an important role played by triplet Cooper pairs in conventional superconducting spintronics based on ferromagnets the question arises: does the triplet proximity effect exist in superconductor/antiferromagnet heterostructures and, if so, what are the properties of the induced triplet correlations and the prospects for use in superconducting spintronics?

Recent theoretical findings predict that despite the absence of a net magnetization, the Néel magnetic order of the antiferromagnet does give rise to specific spin-triplet correlations at superconductor/antiferromagnet interfaces. They were called Néel triplet correlations.

The goal of this review is to discuss the current understanding of the fundamental physics of these Néel triplet correlations and their physical manifestations.

The extensive development of the field of spiking neural networks has led to many areas of research that have a direct impact on people’s lives. As the most bio-similar of all neural networks, spiking neural networks not only allow for the solution of recognition and clustering problems (including dynamics), but they also contribute to the growing understanding of the human nervous system.

Our analysis has shown that hardware implementation is of great importance, since the specifics of the physical processes in the network cells affect their ability to simulate the neural activity of living neural tissue, the efficiency of certain stages of information processing, storage and transmission.

This survey reviews existing hardware neuromorphic implementations of bio-inspired spiking networks in the ”semiconductor”, ”superconductor”, and ”optical” domains. Special attention is given to the potentials for effective ”hybrids” of different approaches.

We provide an overview of the methodology and fundamental principles associated with newly developed experimental technique -- scanning quantum-vortex microscopy. This approach appears promising for experimental studies of vortex pinning phenomena in superconducting films and nanodevices.

In particular, we studied the magnetic properties of magnetron-sputtered niobium (Nb) films by low-temperature magnetic force microscopy. As the temperature approaches the superconducting critical temperature, the pinning potential caused by structural defects weakens; consequently, the attractive interaction between the magnetic tip of the cantilever and a single-quantum vortex begins to dominate.

In this scenario the magnetic probe is capable of trapping a vortex during the scanning process. Because the dragged vortex continues interacting with structural defects, it serves as an efficient nano-probe to explore pinning potentials and visualize grain boundaries in granular Nb films, achieving resolutions (30 nm) comparable to the superconducting coherence length.

We recently demonstrated that the dielectric permittivity of a single-layer SrTiO3 thin film decreases with increasing thickness, and that incorporation of intermediate AlFeO3 layers into an SrTiO3 /AlFeO3 heterostructure mitigates this suppression of dielectric properties. We proposed two temperature-dependent mechanisms that could contribute to this effect: thermal strain and the formation of polar nanoregions (PNRs).

In this study, we used Raman spectroscopy to assess the possibility of PNR formation in single-layer SrTiO3 films (50 and 250 nm thick) and in a multilayer heterostructure 5×[50 nm SrTiO3 + 50 nm AlFeO3 . Our results show that the spectra of SrTiO3-containing structures exhibit telltale signs of PNR formation: the presence of symmetry-forbidden first-order modes and an asymmetric shape of the TO2 mode.