We study the thermoelectric transport of a small metallic island weakly coupled to two electrodes by tunnel junctions. In the Coulomb blockade regime, in the case when the ground state of the system corresponds to an even number of electrons on the i
sland, the main mechanism of electron transport at lowest temperatures is elastic cotunneling. In this regime, the transport coefficients strongly depend on the realization of the random impurity potential or the shape of the island. Using the random-matrix theory, we calculate the thermopower and the thermoelectric kinetic coefficient and study the statistics of their mesoscopic fluctuations in the elastic cotunneling regime. The fluctuations of the thermopower turn out to be much larger than the average value.
The Andreev current and the subgap conductance in a superconductor/ insulator/ ferromagnet (SIF) structure in the presence of a small spin-splitting field show novel interesting features (A. Ozaeta et al., Phys. Rev. B 86, 060509(R), 2012). For examp
le, the Andreev current at zero temperature can be enhanced by a spin-splitting field h, smaller than the superconducting gap, as has been recently reported by the authors. Also at finite temperatures the Andreev current has a peak for values of the spin-splitting field close to the superconducting gap. Finally, the differential subgap conductance at low temperatures shows a peak at the bias voltage eV = h. In this paper we investigate the Andreev current and the subgap conductance in SFF structures with arbitrary direction of magnetization of the F layers. We show that all aforementioned features occur now at the value of the effective field, which is the field acting on the Cooper pairs in the multi-domain ferromagnetic region, averaged over the decay length of the superconducting condensate into a ferromagnet. We also briefly discuss the heat transport and electron cooling in the considered structures.
We investigate heat and charge transport through a diffusive SIF1F2N tunnel junction, where N (S) is a normal (superconducting) electrode, I is an insulator layer and F1,2 are two ferromagnets with arbitrary direction of magnetization. The flow of an
electric current in such structures at subgap bias is accompanied by a heat transfer from the normal metal into the superconductor, which enables refrigeration of electrons in the normal metal. We demonstrate that the refrigeration efficiency depends on the strength of the ferromagnetic exchange field h and the angle {alpha} between the magnetizations of the two F layers. As expected, for values of h much larger than the superconducting order parameter Delta, the proximity effect is suppressed and the efficiency of refrigeration increases with respect to a NIS junction. However, for h sim Delta the cooling power (i.e. the heat flow out of the normal metal reservoir) has a non-monotonic behavior as a function of h showing a minimum at h approx Delta. We also determine the dependence of the cooling power on the lengths of the ferromagnetic layers, the bias voltage, the temperature, the transmission of the tunneling barrier and the magnetization misalignment angle {alpha}.
We investigate the subgap transport properties of a S-F-Ne structure. Here S (Ne) is a superconducting (normal) electrode, and F is either a ferromagnet or a normal wire in the presence of an exchange or a spin- splitting Zeeman field respectively. B
y solving the quasiclassical equations we first analyze the behavior of the subgap current, known as the Andreev current, as a function of the field strength for different values of the voltage, temperature and length of the junction. We show that there is a critical value of the bias voltage V * above which the Andreev current is enhanced by the spin-splitting field. This unexpected behavior can be explained as the competition between two-particle tunneling processes and decoherence mechanisms originated from the temperature, voltage and exchange field respectively. We also show that at finite temperature the Andreev current has a peak for values of the exchange field close to the superconducting gap. Finally, we compute the differential conductance and show that its measurement can be used as an accurate way of determining the strength of spin-splitting fields smaller than the superconducting gap.
We present a quantitative study of the current-voltage characteristics (CVC) of diffusive superconductor/ insulator/ ferromagnet/ superconductor (SIFS) tunnel Josephson junctions. In order to obtain the CVC we calculate the density of states (DOS) in
the F/S bilayer for arbitrary length of the ferromagnetic layer, using quasiclassical theory. For a ferromagnetic layer thickness larger than the characteristic penetration depth of the superconducting condensate into the F layer, we find an analytical expression which agrees with the DOS obtained from a self-consistent numerical method. We discuss general properties of the DOS and its dependence on the parameters of the ferromagnetic layer. In particular we focus our analysis on the DOS oscillations at the Fermi energy. Using the numerically obtained DOS we calculate the corresponding CVC and discuss their properties. Finally, we use CVC to calculate the macroscopic quantum tunneling (MQT) escape rate for the current biased SIFS junctions by taking into account the dissipative correction due to the quasiparticle tunneling. We show that the influence of the quasiparticle dissipation on the macroscopic quantum dynamics of SIFS junctions is small, which is an advantage of SIFS junctions for superconducting qubits applications.
We discuss the theoretical framework to describe quasiparticle electric and heat currents in NIS tunnel junctions in the dirty limit. The approach is based on quasiclassical Keldysh-Usadel equations. We apply this theory to diffusive NISS tunnel junc
tions. Here N and S are respectively normal metal and superconductor reservoirs, I is an insulator layer and S is a nonequilibrium superconducting lead. We calculate the quasiparticle electric and heat currents in such structures and consider the effect of inelastic relaxation in the S lead. We find that in the absence of strong relaxation the electric current and the cooling power for voltages $eV < Delta$ are suppressed. The value of this suppression scales with the diffusive transparency parameter. We ascribe this suppression to the effect of backtunneling of nonequilibrium quasiparticles into the normal metal.
