The extensive development of the field of spiking neural networks has led to many areas of research that have a direct impact on people’s lives. As the most bio-similar of all neural networks, spiking neural networks not only allow for the solution of recognition and clustering problems (including dynamics), but they also contribute to the growing understanding of the human nervous system. Our analysis has shown that hardware implementation is of great importance, since the specifics of the physical processes in the network cells affect their ability to simulate the neural activity of living neural tissue, the efficiency of certain stages of information processing, storage and transmission. This survey reviews existing hardware neuromorphic implementations of bio-inspired spiking networks in the ”semiconductor”, ”superconductor”, and ”optical” domains. Special attention is given to the potentials for effective ”hybrids” of different approaches.

It is well-known that the cornerstone of the proximity effect in superconductor/ferromagnet heterostructures is a generation of triplet Cooper pairs from singlet Cooper pairs inherent in a conventional superconductor. This proximity effect brought a lot of new exciting physics and gave a powerful impulse to development of superconducting spintronics. Nowadays a new direction of spintronics is actively developing, which is based on antiferromagnets and their heterostructures. It is called antiferromagnetic spintronics. By analogy with an important role played by triplet Cooper pairs in conventional superconducting spintronics based on ferromagnets the question arises: does the triplet proximity effect exist in superconductor/antiferromagnet heterostructures and, if so, what are the properties of the induced triplet correlations and the prospects for use in superconducting spintronics? Recent theoretical findings predict that despite the absence of a net magnetization, the Néel magnetic order of the antiferromagnet does give rise to specific spin-triplet correlations at superconductor/antiferromagnet interfaces. They were called Néel triplet correlations. The goal of this review is to discuss the current understanding of the fundamental physics of these Néel triplet correlations and their physical manifestations.

We have studied the Thouless energy in Josephson superconductor – normal metal – superconductor (SN-N-NS) bridges analytically and numerically, considering the influence of the sub-electrode regions. We have discovered a significant suppression of the Thouless energy with increasing interfacial resistance, consistent with experimental results. The analysis of the temperature dependence of the critical current in Josephson junctions in comparison with the expressions for the Thouless energy may allow the determination of the interface parameters of S and N-layers.

Terahertz time-domain spectroscopy is used to perform the first detailed studies of the electrodynamic properties of MoRe (60\( \% \)/40\( \% \)) films with thicknesses ranging from 10 to 100 nm. Films are prepared by magnetron sputtering technique on silicon substrates. The critical temperatures vary from \( 6.5\, \textrm{K} \) (for 10 nm film) to \( 9.5\, \textrm{K} \) (for 100 nm film). Spectra of complex permittivity, conductivity, refraction index, surface impedance and reflection coefficient for the films are acquired at frequencies \( 0.15 - 2.4\, \textrm{THz} \) (wavenumbers \( 5 – 80\, \textrm{cm}^{-1} \)) and in the temperature interval \( T=5\,–\, 300\,\textrm{K} \). For all films, temperature dependencies of the superconducting energy gap, penetration depth, superconducting condensate plasma frequency, and normalised superfluid density are obtained on a quantitative level. It is shown that the reduction of film thickness leads to a strong decrease of the critical temperature and magnitude of the energy gap. The observed suppression of superconductivity is assigned to reduction of the superconducting order parameter due to the contribution to the free energy of the electronic energy states at the surface of superconductor. The MoRe films with the obtained characteristics can be used in designing advanced superconducting electronic devices.

A Journal Facilitating Open Science Across the Intersect of Mesoscopic Physics and Nanotechnology