Ultrafast superconducting optoelectronics

Ultrafast phenomena, optoelectronics, and superconductivity are acknowledged fields of technological importance and a very large amount of research has been performed in these areas in recent years. In modern, highly-advanced digital electronic circuits, the primary function of high-performance, high-speed signal processing is given to superconducting single-flux-quantum (SFQ) logical devices, based on resistively-shunted Josephson tunnel junctions. The development of this branch of digital electronics requires ultrafast, and ultra sensitive optical-to-electrical transducers for fiber optic interconnects, which must be able to transform to the electrical domain the input information coded in the form of a train of ultrafast optical pulses and, subsequently, feed it into the SFQ processor