No Arabic abstract
We perform a comparative study of the quantum and classical transport probabilities of low-energy quasiparticles ballistically traversing normal and Andreev two-dimensional open cavities with a Sinai-billiard shape. We focus on the dependence of the transport on the strength of an applied magnetic field $B$. With increasing field strength the classical dynamics changes from mixed to regular phase space. Averaging out the quantum fluctuations, we find an excellent agreement between the quantum and classical transport coefficients in the complete range of field strengths. This allows an overall description of the non-monotonic behavior of the average magnetoconductance in terms of the corresponding classical trajectories, thus, establishing a basic tool useful in the design and analysis of experiments.
We present a classical and quantum mechanical study of an Andreev billiard with a chaotic normal dot. We demonstrate that in general the classical dynamics of these normal-superconductor hybrid systems is mixed, thereby indicating the limitations of a widely used retracing approximation. We show that the mixed classical dynamics gives rise to a wealth of wavefunction phenomena, including periodic orbit scarring and localization of the wavefunction onto other classical phase space objects such as intermittent regions and quantized tori.
We demonstrate that the exact quantum mechanical calculations are in good agreement with the semiclassical predictions for rectangular Andreev billiards and therefore for a large number of open channels it is sufficient to investigate the Bohr-Sommerfeld approximation of the density of states. We present exact calculations of the classical path length distribution $P(s)$ which is a non-differentiable function of $s$, but whose integral is a smooth function with logarithmically dependent asymptotic behavior. Consequently, the density of states of rectangular Andreev billiards has two contributions on the scale of the Thouless energy: one which is well-known and it is proportional to the energy, and the other which shows a logarithmic energy dependence. It is shown that the prefactors of both contributions depend on the geometry of the billiards but they have universal limiting values when the width of the superconductor tends to zero.
We examine the density of states of an Andreev billiard and show that any billiard with a finite upper cut-off in the path length distribution $P(s)$ will possess an energy gap on the scale of the Thouless energy. An exact quantum mechanical calculation for different Andreev billiards gives good agreement with the semi-classical predictions when the energy dependent phase shift for Andreev reflections is properly taken into account. Based on this new semi-classical Bohr-Sommerfeld approximation of the density of states, we derive a simple formula for the energy gap. We show that the energy gap, in units of Thouless energy, may exceed the value predicted earlier from random matrix theory for chaotic billiards.
Comparing the results of exact quantum calculations and those obtained from the EBK-like quantization scheme of Silvestrov et al [Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 116801 (2003)] we show that the spectrum of Andreev billiards of mixed phase space can basically be decomposed into a regular and an irregular part, similarly to normal billiards. We provide the first numerical confirmation of the validity of this quantization scheme for individual eigenstates and discuss its accuracy.
We study the transport properties of low-energy (quasi)particles ballistically traversing normal and Andreev two-dimensional open cavities with a Sinai-billiard shape. We consider four different geometrical setups and focus on the dependence of transport on the strength of an applied magnetic field. By solving the classical equations of motion for each setup we calculate the magnetoconductance in terms of transmission and reflection coefficients for both the normal and Andre