Efficient superconducting diodes and rectifiers for quantum circuitry | Hacker News Reader

Efficient superconducting diodes and rectifiers for quantum circuitry

nature.com

2 pointswesturner5 comments

ScholarlyArticle: "Efficient superconducting diodes and rectifiers for quantum circuitry" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-025-01375-5

NewsArticle: "Superconducting diode bridge efficiently converts AC to DC for quantum circuits" https://phys.org/news/2025-05-superconducting-diode-bridge-e... :

> Their superconducting diode bridge, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, was found to perform remarkably well at cryogenic temperatures, achieving rectification efficiencies as high as 42% ± 5%.

Yeah, what I see is

   The bridge can function as a full-wave rectifier with an efficiency 
   up to 42 ±   5%, and offers alternating current (a.c.) to direct current
   (d.c.) signal conversion capabilities at frequencies up to 40 kHz

ordinary bridge rectifiers are almost twice as efficient as that, it's an unusual question to be concerned about how high frequency they can work at, past 10 kHz the switching time of diodes is a problem but I hear you can get diodes that switch around 1 MHz if you had to.

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/152225/what-...

DC current is 0 Hz.

Isn't 110V AC typically 0.06 kHz (60 Hz) in the US?

0.06 kHz < 40 kHz

Yeah, people usually use bridge rectifiers with 50 or 60 Hz or maybe 400 Hz in aviation applications.

However, the way people build power supplies has changed completely since the 1970s when I was a kid reading ham radio books that told you to get a big transformer, hook it to a bridge rectifier, and have a filter with some large capacitors in it. Today the state of the art is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_supply

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck%E2%80%93boost_converter

My son was looking for an 18V-1A power supply for a guitar gadget and looking around the house he told me "there doesn't seem to be any connection with the voltage and current and the size of the supply" and it's precisely because of that revolution. Even if the input power is 60 Hz the power supply switches at 100 kHz or more which means the filter network is vastly smaller and you don't have the really dangerous big capacitors you might have seen in the power supply of a PDP-11 or something like that.

Are there smaller AC to USB-C PD power adapters than GaN?

GaN > Transistors and power ICs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium_nitride#Transistors_an...

Rectifiers > Rectifier circuits, Rectification technologies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectifier#Rectification_techno...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40693984#40720147 :

> Is there a rectifier for gravitational waves, and what would that do?

Basically just abs() absolute value eh

IDK what the SOTA efficiency of these is: "Nanoscale spin rectifiers for harvesting ambient radiofrequency energy" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43234022

BespokeSynth is an open source "software modular synth" DAW that can host LV2 and VST3 plugins like Guitarix, which can also add signal transforms like guitar effects pedals. Tried searching for an apparently exotic 1A universal power supply. Apparently also exotic: A board of guitar pedals with IDK one USB-A and a USB-C adapter with OSC and MIDI support; USB MIDI trololo pedals

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