Superconducting Tunnel Junctions

When two superconductors are separated by a thin insulating barrier they form what's called a Josephson Junction, after Brian Josephson who discovered the effect while a grad student and subsequently won the Nobel prize for it. This device has proven over the last half century to have a very diverse set of applications including various precision electrical standards, some potential classical computers, quantum computers, and amplifiers of very tiny electrical signals. It is the last of these that I've been involved with, and have worked on several different types of amplifiers using the Josephson Junction, both in grad school, as a post doc and researcher at NIST and then as an independent consultant with a couple different organizations and companies.

I have also made some amusing youtube videos on the subject of Josephson junction dynamics which can be found here:

Note these videos are only probably amusing if you have already studied JJ dynamics in detail. Otherwise they probably make very little sense.

I have several published papers on JJ amplifiers, which can be found on my Google Scholar page here.

While Josephson Junctions have been a very interesting and useful technology for several decades, and have helped me make a living, I think that work on low temperature technology is mostly a waste of time and money. I probably should not say this, since it still helps me make a living, but I think quantum computing is, like its classical JJ computing cousin, a giant boondoggle. Anything at a temperature below 77 kelvin(the boiling point of liquid nitrogen) is, in my view, a waste of time at this point in human history.