Self-Heating in Small Mesa Structures Made of Intrinsic Josephson Junctions in BSCCO

Abstract

We present detailed numerical analysis on the temperature rise due to self-heating for a small mesa in interlayer tunneling spectroscopy based on the thermal diffusion equation using temperature dependent specific heat and thermal conductivity data. In the analysis, a BSCCO square mesa typically 10 mum wide and 15 nm thick with the -axis resistivity of 10 Omegacm is in close contact with the 350 nm Au electrode layer on the top. It is found that when a quasiparticle current of 20 mA is injected, which is a typical value at the superconducting gap voltage, the temperature rise due to self-heating is 3.8 K at 60 ns from the pulse rise and 4.6 K at 500 ns when the base temperature is 10 K. When the current is 50 mA, the temperature rise is 18 K at 60 ns and 22 K at 500 ns, indicating a significant heating near the edge of the voltage range, where the pseudogap is observed in short-pulse tunneling experiments.