Abstract
How does a superconductor in contact with another through an atomic-scale junction influence the electronic properties in the latter? Investigating a submicron superconducting island of single-crystal Pb embedded in a pre-superconducting Pb crystalline monolayer, scientists reveal a giant region of induced superconductivity in the monolayer and also offer a theory for describing such proximity effects.
Highlights
If a normal metal (N) is in good electrical contact with a superconductor (S), Cooper pairs can leak from S to N, modifying the properties of the metal
When a Cooper pair penetrates into a normal metal, via an Andreev reflection [4], it becomes a pair of time-reversed electron states that propagate coherently over a distanpceffiffiffiLffiffiffiffiCffiffi,ffiffiffiwhich in diffusive metals is given by LC 1⁄4 minf ħD=E; Lφg, where D is the diffusion constant, E is the energy of the electron states, and Lφ is the phase-coherence length in N
Metal over a distance LC from the S-N interface. Such a modification has been spatially resolved in recent years with the help of tunneling probes [5,6] and with scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/STS) techniques applied to mesoscopic systems [7,8,9,10,11]
Summary
If a normal metal (N) is in good electrical contact with a superconductor (S), Cooper pairs can leak from S to N, modifying the properties of the metal This phenomenon, known as a proximity effect, was intensively studied in the 1960s [1,2], and there has been a renewed interest in the last two decades because of the possibility of studying this effect at much smaller length and energy scales [3]. We present a STM/STS study of the proximity effect in a lateral S1-S2 junction with a very high spatial and energy resolution, for temperatures well below and above TC2.
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