De-constricting the heat

Kumar and his colleagues have demonstrated an effective shunt design in their work entitled 'Controlling hysteresis in superconducting constrictions with a resistive shunt'. Their shunt widens the temperature window of non-hysteretic operation of their devices and allows them to fully understand the role of the shunt on the junction behavior, removing run-to-run variation in device parameters that usually make such comparisons difficult. Their technique utilizes a gold shunt in parallel to the superconducting weak link.