Fabrication of mesoscopic Nb wires using conventional e-beam lithographic techniques

Conventional electron beam lithography has been used to fabricate mesoscopic Nb wires with a superconducting transition temperature above 7.0 K. The typical line width and the thickness were 200 nm and 45 nm respectively. Nb was deposited in an ultra-high vacuum evaporation chamber using electron gun heating. All samples exhibited a normal-superconducting transition. The transition temperature decreased with thickness and line width. To demonstrate the feasibility of two angle evaporation techniques we also fabricated small Nb/(Al-)AlO_x/Nb tunnel junctions.