A Method to Detect Quantum Coherent Transport in Memristive Devices

TL;DR

This paper proposes an experimental protocol to detect quantum coherence in memristive devices by observing harmonic mixing effects induced by periodic measurements, indicating quantum superposition states.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel experimental method to identify quantum effects in memristors through spectral analysis of their response to periodic measurements.

Findings

Spectral components reveal nonlinear quantum dynamics.

Resonant behavior occurs when measurement and input frequencies match.

Harmonic mixing indicates quantum superposition in memristors.

Abstract

While the size of functional elements in memristors becomes of the orders of nano-meters or even smaller, the quantum effects in their dynamics can significantly influence their transport properties, consistent with recent experimental observations of conductance quantisation in memristors. This requires the development of experimentally realizable procedures to detect quantumness of memristors. Here we developed an experimental protocol allowing us to find evidence that the memristor can be in a superposition of states with different memristivities. We simulate the nonlinearity induced in the quantum memristive system via periodic projective measurements, observing how it manifests itself in the emergence of additional spectral components in the response to the harmonic signal. Moreover, the response demonstrates a resonant behaviour when the frequency of the projective measurements commensurates with the frequency of the input. We demonstrate that observation of such harmonic mixing can be used as experimental evidence of quantum effects in memristors.