Open Source Software and Technological Innovation: Competitive Issues

The new model of the products development and distribution represented by the open source movement has an important impact on the composition of the software market because it is a system alternative to the proprietary model. The antitrust analysis of the software market has to value, therefore, the strong effect of the open source development and distribution on the market contendibility and on the effectiveness to substitute the proprietary scheme

Phase-tunable thermoelectricity in a Josephson junction

Superconducting tunnel junctions constitute the units of superconducting quantum circuits and are massively used both for quantum sensing and quantum computation. In previous works, we predicted the existence of a nonlinear thermoelectric effect in a electron-hole symmetric system, namely, a thermally biased tunnel junction between two different superconductors, where the Josephson effect is suppressed. In this paper we investigate the impact of the phase-coherent contributions on the thermoelectric effect, by tuning the size of the Josephson coupling changing the flux of a direct-current Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (dc-SQUID). For a suppressed Josephson coupling, the system generates a finite average thermoelectric signal, combined to an oscillation due to the standard ac Josephson phenomenology. At large Josephson couplings, the thermoelectricity induces an oscillatory behaviour with zero average value of the current/voltage with an amplitude and a frequency associated to the Josephson coupling strength, and ultimately tuned by the dc-SQUID magnetic flux. In conclusion, we demonstrate to be able to control the dynamics of the spontaneous breaking of the electron-hole symmetry. Furthermore, we compute how the flux applied to the dc-SQUID and the lumped elements of the circuit determine the frequency of the thermoelectric signal across the structure, and we envision a frequency modulation application

Spontaneous symmetry breaking induced thermospin effect in superconducting tunnel junctions

We discuss the charge and the spin tunneling currents between two Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superconductors, where one density of states is spin-split by the proximity of a ferromagnetic insulator. In the presence of a large temperature bias across the junction, we predict the generation of a spin-polarized thermoelectric current. This thermospin effect is the result of a spontaneous particle-hole symmetry breaking in the absence of any polarizing tunnel barrier. The two spin components, which move in opposite directions, generate a spin current larger than the purely polarized case when the thermoactive component dominates over the dissipative one

Phase-tunable temperature amplifier

Coherent caloritronics, the thermal counterpart of coherent electronics, has drawn growing attention since the discovery of heat interference in 2012. Thermal interferometers, diodes, transistors and nano-valves have been theoretically proposed and experimentally demonstrated by exploiting the quantum phase difference between two superconductors coupled through a Josephson junction. So far, the quantum-phase modulator has been realized in the form of a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) or a superconducting quantum interference proximity transistor (SQUIPT). Thence, an external magnetic field is necessary in order to manipulate the heat transport. Here, we theoretically propose the first on-chip fully thermal caloritronic device: the phase-tunable temperature amplifier (PTA). Taking advantage of a recently discovered thermoelectric effect in spin-split superconductors coupled to a spin-polarized system, we generate the magnetic flux controlling the transport through a temperature-biased SQUIPT by applying a temperature gradient. We simulate the behavior of the device and define a number of figures of merit in full analogy with voltage amplifiers. Notably, our architecture ensures almost infinite input thermal impedance, maximum gain of about 11 and efficiency reaching the 95%. This concept paves the way for applications in radiation sensing, thermal logics and quantum information

Phase-Tunable Thermal Logic: Computation with Heat

Boolean algebra, the branch of mathematics in which variables can assume only true or false values, is the theoretical basis of classical computation. The analogy between Boolean operations and electronic switching circuits, highlighted by Shannon in 1938, paved the way for modern computation based on electronic devices. The growth in the computational power of such devices, after an exciting exponential - Moore's trend - is nowadays blocked by heat dissipation due to computational tasks, which are very demanding due to the miniaturization of chips. Heat is often a detrimental form of energy which increases the system's entropy, decreasing the efficiency of logic operations. Here, we propose a physical system that is able to perform thermal-logic operations by reversing the old heat-disorder epitome into a heat-order paradigm. We lay the foundations of heat computation by encoding logic state variables in temperature and introducing the thermal counterparts of electronic logic gates. Exploiting quantum effects in thermally biased Josephson junctions (JJs), we propound a possible realization of a functionally complete logic. Our architecture ensures high operational stability and robustness, with switching frequencies reaching the GHz range