A team of researchers with members from several countries in Europe has used a type of X-ray diffraction to reveal defects in the way a superconductor develops. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the team describes the technique they used to study one type of superconductor and what they saw. Erica Carlson with Perdue University offers a News & Views piece on the work done by the t...

We predict a strong enhancement of the critical temperature in a conventional Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superconductor in the presence of a bosonic condensate of exciton polaritons. The effect depends strongly on the ratio of the cutoff frequencies for phonon and exciton-polariton mediated BCS superconductivity, respectively. We also discuss a possible design of hybrid semiconductor-super...

We examine the effect of an impurity on the nearby tunneling conductance in an anisotropically-gapped superconductor. The variation of the conductance has pronounced spatial dependence which depends strongly on the Fermi surface location of gap extrema. In particular, different gap symmetries produce profoundly different spatial features in the conductance. These effects may be detectable with ...

We propose a spin-independent scheme to generate and detect two-particle entanglement in a mesoscopic normal-superconductor system. A superconductor, weakly coupled to the normal conductor, generates an orbitally entangled state by injecting pairs of electrons into different leads of the normal conductor. The entanglement is detected via violation of a Bell inequality, formulated in terms of ze...

An on-chip detection scheme for high frequency signals is used to detect noise generated by a quantum dot formed in a single wall carbon nanotube. The noise detection is based on photon assisted tunneling in a superconductor-insulator-superconductor junction. Measurements of shot noise over a full Coulomb diamond are reported with excited states and inelastic cotunneling clearly resolved. Super...

We investigate electron cooling based on a clean normal-metal/spin-filter/superconductor junction. Due to the suppression of the Andreev reflection by the spin-filter effect, the cooling power of the system is found to be extremely higher than that for conventional normal-metal/nonmagnetic-insulator/superconductor coolers. Therefore we can extract large amount of heat from normal metals. Our re...

We investigate hysteresis in the transport properties of superconductor-normal-metal-superconductor (S-N-S) junctions at low temperatures by measuring directly the electron temperature in the normal metal. Our results demonstrate unambiguously that the hysteresis results from an increase of the normal-metal electron temperature once the junction switches to the resistive state. In our geometry,...

We explore the effects of an applied strong external magnetic field in a three flavour massless colour superconductor. The long-range component of the B field that penetrates the superconductor enhances some quark condensates, leading to a different condensation pattern. The external field also reduces the flavour symmetries in the system, and thus it changes drastically the corresponding low e...

The detailed operation of an electron spin entangler is studied, using density matrix equations. The device is made of a superconductor, two quantum dots and two normal leads. The treatment takes into account coherent tunneling in a non-perturbative way, and analyzes the various parasitic effects, in addition to the main process (crossed Andreev reflection) : those include singlet pairs passing...

We find that the dependence on temperature and magnetic field of the electrical resistance of diffusive ferromagnetic nano-wires measured with superconducting electrodes changes drastically with the distance, L, between the ferromagnet/superconductor contacts, however is remarkably similar for the wires with the same L ranging from 300 nm to 1000 nm, prepared under identical conditions. The res...