Electron transport through a quantum dot coupled to superconducting leads shows a sharp conductance onset when a quantum dot orbital level crosses the superconducting coherence peak of one lead. We study superconducting single electron transistors in
the weak coupling limit by connecting individual gold nanoparticles with aluminum junctions formed by electromigration. We show that the transport features close to the conductance onset threshold can be accurately described by the quantum dot levels hybridization with the leads, which is strongly enhanced by the divergent density of states at the superconducting gap edge. This highlights the importance of electron cotunneling effects in spectroscopies with superconducting probes.
We report a novel method for the fabrication of superconducting nanodevices based on niobium. The well-known difficulties of lithographic patterning of high-quality niobium are overcome by replacing the usual organic resist mask by a metallic one. Th
e quality of the fabrication procedure is demonstrated by the realization and characterization of long and narrow superconducting lines and niobium-gold-niobium proximity SQUIDs.
Graphene on a dielectric substrate exhibits spatial doping inhomogeneities, forming electron-hole puddles. Understanding and controlling the latter is of crucial importance for unraveling many of graphenes fundamental properties at the Dirac point. H
ere we show the coexistence and correlation of charge puddles and topographic ripples in graphene decoupled from the metallic substrate it was grown on. The analysis of interferences of Dirac fermion-like electrons yields a linear dispersion relation, indicating that graphene on a metal can recover its intrinsic electronic properties.
Single molecule transistors (SMTs) are currently attracting enormous attention as possible quantum information processing devices. An intrinsic limitation to the prospects of these however is associated to the presence of a small number of quantized
conductance channels, each channel having a high access resistance of at best $R_{K}/2=h/2e^{2}$=12.9 k$Omega$. When the contacting leads become superconducting, these correlations can extend throughout the whole system by the proximity effect. This not only lifts the resistive limitation of normal state contacts, but further paves a new way to probe electron transport through a single molecule. In this work, we demonstrate the realization of superconducting SMTs involving a single C60 fullerene molecule. The last few years have seen gate-controlled Josephson supercurrents induced in the family of low dimensional carbon structures such as flakes of two-dimensional graphene and portions of one-dimensional carbon nanotubes. The present study involving a full zero-dimensionnal fullerene completes the picture.
