Tunable superconductors could underpin reconfigurable quantum circuits. Researchers at Aalto University and partners have shown that suspended thin layers of the superconductor NbSe2 can be controlled with local strain and heating.
Straining the suspended layers shifted the critical temperature by up to about 0.92 K, around 12.5%, and enabled gate-tunable critical currents. The devices also showed configurable hysteresis, multistability and negative differential resistance, which density functional theory and time-dependent Ginzburg–Landau modelling explain well. The work brings together three QMAT groups at Aalto, Zhipei Sun's Photonics group, Pertti Hakonen's Quantum Circuits & Correlations group and Jose Lado's Correlated Quantum Materials group, with first author Ruihuan Fang and partners in Madrid, Denmark and South Korea.
Figure: Fang et al., Adv. Electron. Mater. (2026); image from arXiv:2511.05763, CC BY 4.0