Dissipation in Nanostructured Superconductors

Decoherence due to dissipative coupling to an environment is a topic of both fundamental and practical interest. To study the interplay between coherence and dissipation, we have fabricated planar arrays of proximity-coupled superconducting islands on metallic substrates. The superconducting islands are well-understood coherent systems with long-range electron interactions, while the intervening normal metal channels introduce known dissipation into the system. We will present results of low-temperature transport measurements of these systems, where we analyze the effects of dissipation by changing the island sizes and spacings.