Coulomb Blockade and Multiple Andreev Reflection in a Superconducting Single-Electron Transistor

Abstract

In superconducting quantum point contacts, multiple Andreev reflection (MAR), which describes the coherent transport of m quasiparticles each carrying an electron charge with $$m\ge 3$$ , sets in at voltage thresholds $$eV = 2\Delta /m$$ . In single-electron transistors, Coulomb blockade, however, suppresses the current at low voltage. The required voltage for charge transport increases with the square of the effective charge $$eV\propto \left( me\right) ^2$$ . Thus, studying the charge transport in all-superconducting single-electron transistors (SSETs) sets these two phenomena into competition. In this article, we present the fabrication as well as a measurement scheme and transport data for a SSET with one junction in which the transmission and thereby the MAR contributions can be continuously tuned. All regimes from weak to strong coupling are addressed. We extend the Orthodox theory by incorporating MAR processes to describe the observed data qualitatively. We detect a new transport process the nature of which is unclear at present. Furthermore, we observe a renormalization of the charging energy when approaching the strong coupling regime.