The Super Separator Spectrometer S is a device designed for experiments with the very high intensity stable ion beam of the superconducting linear accelerator of the SPIRAL2 facility. Its Physics goals cover the study of radioactive ions produced by fusion-evaporation reactions, like superheavy elements or neutron deficient nuclei close to the proton drip line, but also neutron rich nuclei prod...

Detecting single-photon level signals—carriers of both classical and quantum information—is particularly challenging for low-energy microwave frequency excitations. Here we introduce a superconducting amplifier based on a Josephson junction transmission line. Unlike current standing-wave parametric amplifiers, this traveling wave architecture robustly achieves high gain over a bandwidth of seve...

The Primordial Anisotropy Polarization Pathfinder Array (PAPPA) is a balloonbased instrument to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background and search for the signal from gravity waves excited during an inflationary epoch in the early universe. PAPPA will survey a 20◦ × 20◦ patch at the North Celestial Pole using 32 pixels in 3 passbands centered at 89, 212, and 302 GHz. Each pi...

In this thesis, measurements on superconducting electrical circuits that exhibit quantum mechanical effects are presented. Nonlinear superconducting circuits can be regarded as artificial atoms with energy spectra that can be engineered. The artificial atoms can be used as quantum bits for quantum computation. By coupling the artificial atoms to the electromagnetic field inside a transmission l...

The power-law temperature dependences of the specific heat, the nuclear relaxation rate, and the thermal conductivity suggest the presence of line nodes in the superconducting gap of Sr2RuO4. These recent experimental observations contradict the scenario of a nodeless (k(x)+ik(y))-type superconducting order parameter. We propose that interaction of superconducting order parameters on different ...