Physics / mechanism
Superconducting electronics uses dissipationless supercurrents and Josephson coupling as the basis for logic, rectification and signal processing, rather than the charge-transport switching of semiconductor transistors. The motivating claim across the recent literature is ultra-low-power operation at cryogenic temperatures, with candidate roles as rectifying elements, logic gates and building blocks for hybrid classical-quantum supercomputers.
The most active device primitive is the superconducting diode effect (SDE): a critical current that differs depending on current direction, giving non-dissipative rectification. Conventionally this requires simultaneous breaking of time-reversal and inversion (parity) symmetry. The engineering problem is therefore how to supply those broken symmetries. Reported routes include intrinsic material symmetry breaking in CVD-grown Mo2C nanoflakes, where both field-odd and field-free SDEs appear in a material previously treated as centrosymmetric, with field-odd efficiency above 40% at 4 K under a perpendicular in-plane field; asymmetric disorder in graphene Josephson junctions, giving rectification efficiency above 20% under a millitesla out-of-plane field and enhanced near the nodes of the Fraunhofer pattern; and purely geometric inversion-symmetry breaking in a single-material NbN nanoring, which shows polarity-switchable critical-current nonreciprocity.
Fabrication is a distinct bottleneck. Cuprates such as YBCO are attractive for low-power computing, storage, quantum sensors and superconducting electronics, but resist conventional nanofabrication; direct laser writing exploits the strong dependence of superconducting and normal-state properties on oxygen stoichiometry to produce sub-micrometre grayscale patterns with finely tuned optical and superconducting properties over large areas. Additive fabrication has been demonstrated as well: liquid-metal micro-pipette printing produces superconducting lumped-element resonators with high internal quality factors, contrary to the expectation that additive routes are inferior for superconducting properties and coherence.
Competitive landscape
Evidence base
Frontier (open questions)
Synthesised 2026-08-31 from 8 KB sources by the resynth pipeline; citations are KB source slugs.