Nanowire could provide a stable, easy-to-make superconducting transistor

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"... But [current] superconducting devices can be finicky. Often, they’re expensive to manufacture and prone to err from environmental noise. ...
In 1956, MIT electrical engineer Dudley Buck published a description of a superconducting computer switch called the cryotron. The device was little more than two superconducting wires: One was straight, and the other was coiled around it. The cryotron acts as a switch, because when current flows through the coiled wire, its magnetic field reduces the current flowing through the straight wire. ...

Now, Berggren is rekindling Buck’s ideas about superconducting computer switches. “The devices we’re making are very much like cryotrons in that they don’t require Josephson junctions,” he says. He dubbed his superconducting nanowire device the nano-cryotron in tribute to Buck — though it works a bit differently than the original cryotron.

The nano-cryotron uses heat to trigger a switch ... current runs through a superconducting, supercooled wire called the “channel.” That channel is intersected by an even smaller wire called a “choke” ... When current is sent through the choke, its superconductivity breaks down and it heats up. Once that heat spreads from the choke to the main channel, it causes the main channel to also lose its superconducting state. ...
Berggren’s group has already demonstrated proof-of-concept for the nano-cryotron’s use as an electronic component. A former student of Berggren’s, Adam McCaughan, developed a device that uses nano-cryotrons to add binary digits. And Berggren has successfully used nano-cryotrons as an interface between superconducting devices and classical, transistor-based electronics. ..." 

Nanowire could provide a stable, easy-to-make superconducting transistor | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Inspired by decades-old MIT research, the new technology could boost quantum computers and other superconducting electronics.