Hall Effect Gyrators and Circulators

Abstract

The electronic circulator, and its close relative the gyrator, are invaluable tools for noise management and signal routing in the current generation of low-temperature microwave systems for the implementation of new quantum technologies. The current implementation of these devices using the Faraday effect is satisfactory, but requires a bulky structure whose physical dimension is close to the microwave wavelength employed. The Hall effect is an alternative non-reciprocal effect that can also be used to produce desired device functionality. We review earlier efforts to use an ohmically-contacted four-terminal Hall bar, explaining why this approach leads to unacceptably high device loss. We find that capacitive coupling to such a Hall conductor has much greater promise for achieving good circulator and gyrator functionality. We formulate a classical Ohm-Hall analysis for calculating the properties of such a device, and show how this classical theory simplifies remarkably in the limiting case of the Hall angle approaching 90 degrees. In this limit we find that either a four-terminal or a three-terminal capacitive device can give excellent circulator behavior, with device dimensions far smaller than the a.c. wavelength. An experiment is proposed to achieve GHz-band gyration in millimetre (and smaller) scale structures employing either semiconductor heterostructure or graphene Hall conductors. An inductively coupled scheme for realising a Hall gyrator is also analysed.