Reducing sensor dimension is a good way to increase system sensitivity and response. However the advantages gained must be weighed against other effects which also became significant during the scaling process. In this paper, the scaling effect of cantilever sensors from micrometre to nanometre regimes is reviewed. Changes in the physical properties such as Q-factor, Young's modulus, noise and nonlinear deflections, as well as effects on practical sensor applications such as sensor response and sensor readouts, are presented. Since cantilever is an elemental transducer and device building block, its scaling effects can be further extrapolated to other sensing systems and applications.

Hybrid superconducting circuits, which integrate nonsuperconducting elements into a circuit quantum electrodynamics (cQED) architecture, expand the possible applications of cQED. Building hybrid circuits that work in large magnetic fields presents even further possibilities, such as the probing of spin-polarized Andreev bound states and the investigation of topological superconductivity. Here we present a magnetic-field compatible hybrid fluxonium with an electrostatically tuned semiconducting nanowire as its nonlinear element. We operate the fluxonium in magnetic fields up to 1 T and use it to observe the f0-Josephson effect. This combination of gate tunability and field compatibility opens avenues for the control of spin-polarized phenomena using superconducting circuits and enables the use of the fluxonium as a readout device for topological qubits.

Isolation from the environment determines the extent to which charge is confined on an island, which manifests as Coulomb oscillations, such as charge dispersion. We investigate the charge dispersion of a nanowire transmon hosting a quantum dot in the junction. We observe rapid suppression of the charge dispersion with increasing junction transparency, consistent with the predicted scaling law, which incorporates two branches of the Josephson potential. We find improved qubit coherence times at the point of highest suppression, suggesting novel approaches for building charge-insensitive qubits.