[_8091149529]

This is quite a convoluted way of making an electrical switch. In brief, the carriers of supercurrent (Cooper pairs) in the channel are "depleted" (actually: broken up) by a local heater that raises the channel temperature above the superconductor's critical temperature.

The circuit topology, a heater coupled to a superconducting wire to sense the local tempreature, is the same as in a transition-edge sensor (TES), and functionally identical to a supercondicting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD). [SNSPD does not have a separate heater.] These cryogenic detectors are typically used when a good electrical amplifier does not exist for the input radiation. A textbook example would be optical or x-ray photons.

I believe the device will be terribly inefficient as a transistor. The root cause is that the electrical signal gets converted into heat and back: Heater current -> Electron heating -> Phonon (lattice) heating -> Breaking of Cooper pairs in the channel -> Suppression of (super)current. Once the heat is in the phonons (lattice vibrations), it can propagate anywhere in the chip substrate.

Also, the active area needs to be continuously heated to maintain the resistive ("off") state.

Since HN is mostly a computing-oriented forum: This transistor will not be used for general-purpose logic cricuits.