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Matteo Arfini

Publications and source records attributed to Matteo Arfini.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Magnon polaritons in a van der Waals ferromagnet coupled to a superconducting resonator

Achieving magnon-photon hybridization in the microwave regime is essential for integrating magnetic excitations with superconducting circuits. While this has been extensively demonstrated in bulk magnetic systems, realizing it in two-dimensional van der Waals materials remains challenging due to their reduced magnetic volume and increased dissipation. Here, magnon-photon hybridization is observed in exfoliated flakes of the van der Waals ferromagnet Cr$_2$Ge$_2$Te$_6$, with thicknesses down to 30 nm. The resulting magnon polaritons-hybrid excitations of cavity photons and magnons-are evidenced by reproducible avoided crossings across six devices, enabled by a low-impedance superconducting resonator design. The coupling strength follows the expected square-root dependence on thickness, and extrapolation of this scaling indicates that hybridization in the monolayer limit is within reach.

cond-mat.mes-hall

On-chip stencil lithography for superconducting qubits

Improvements in circuit design and more recently in materials and surface cleaning have contributed to a rapid development of coherent superconducting qubits. However, organic resists commonly used for shadow evaporation of Josephson junctions (JJs) pose limitations due to residual contamination, poor thermal stability and compatibility under typical surface-cleaning conditions. To provide an alternative, we developed an inorganic SiO$_2$/Si$_3$N$_4$ on-chip stencil lithography mask for JJ fabrication. The stencil mask is resilient to aggressive cleaning agents and it withstands high temperatures up to 1200{\deg}C, thereby opening new avenues for JJ material exploration and interface optimization. To validate the concept, we performed shadow evaporation of Al-based transmon qubits followed by stencil mask lift-off using vapor hydrofluoric acid, which selectively etches SiO$_2$. We demonstrate average $T_1 \approx 75 \pm 11 \mu$s over a 200 MHz frequency range in multiple cool-downs for one device, and $T_1 \approx 44\pm 8 \mu$s for a second device. These results confirm the compatibility of stencil lithography with state-of-the-art superconducting quantum devices and motivate further investigations into materials engineering, film deposition and surface cleaning techniques.

quant-ph

Magnon-magnon interaction induced by nonlinear spin wave dynamics

We experimentally and theoretically demonstrate that nonlinear spin-wave dynamics can induce an effective resonant interaction between non-resonant magnon modes in a yttrium iron garnet disk. Under strong pumping near the ferromagnetic resonance mode, we observe a spectral splitting that emerges with increasing drive amplitude. This phenomenon is well captured by a theoretical framework based on the linearization of a magnon three-wave mixing Hamiltonian, which at high power leads to parametric Suhl instabilities. The access and control of nonlinear magnon-parametric processes enables the development of experimental platforms in an unexplored parameter regime for both classical and quantum computation protocols.

cond-mat.mes-hall