We explore the signatures of Majorana fermions in a nanowire based topological superconductor-quantum dot-topological superconductor hybrid device by charge transport measurements. At zero magnetic field, well-defined Coulomb diamonds and the Kondo effect are observed. Under the application of a finite, sufficiently strong magnetic field, a zero-bias conductance peak structure is observed. It i...

Normal superconductors with Rashba spin-orbit coupling have been explored as candidate systems of topological superconductors. Here we present a comparative theoretical study of the effects of different types of disorder on the topological phases of two-dimensional Rashba spin-orbit coupled superconductors. First, we show that a topologically trivial superconductor can be driven into a chiral t...

Crucially important for application of type-II superconductor films is the stability of the vortex matter--magnetic flux lines penetrating the material. If some vortices get detached from pinning centres, the energy dissipated by their motion will facilitate further depinning, and may trigger a massive electromagnetic breakdown. Up to now, the time-resolved behaviour of these ultra-fast events ...

The transport of heat and charge in the overdoped cuprate superconductor Tl(2)Ba2CuO(6+delta) was measured down to low temperature. In the normal state, obtained by applying a magnetic field greater than the upper critical field, the Wiedemann-Franz law is verified to hold perfectly. In the superconducting state, a large residual linear term is observed in the thermal conductivity, in quantitat...

We study gluodynamics in an external Abelian electromagnetic field within the dual superconductor approach. We show that the SU (2) gluodynamics should possess a deconfining phase transition at zero temperature at certain value of the external field. A dual superconductor model for the SU (3) gauge theory in external field predicts a rich phase structure containing confinement, asymmetric confi...

We review experiments over the last ten years on thermal transport in mesoscopic normal metals in contact with a superconductor. The main focus of this effort has been on the exploration of coherent thermal effects in mesoscopic normal-metal/superconductor structures, i.e. effects in which the phase of the quasiparticles participating in thermal transport is important. Coherence in thermal tran...

We have performed low-temperature specific heat and thermal conductivity measurements of the Ni-based superconductor BaNi2As2 (T{c}=0.7 K) in a magnetic field. In a zero field, thermal conductivity shows T-linear behavior in the normal state and exhibits a BCS-like exponential decrease below T{c}. The field dependence of the residual thermal conductivity extrapolated to zero temperature is indi...

The Pfaffian phase in the proximity of a half-filled Landau level is understood to be a p+ip superconductor of composite fermions. We consider the properties of this paired quantum Hall phase when the pairing energy is small, i.e., in the weak-coupling, BCS limit, where the coherence length is much larger than the charge screening length. We find that, as in a type I superconductor, vortices at...

We study the proximity coherence in a mesoscopic normal-metal film in contact with a superconductor. Accounting for a repulsive interaction between the electrons in the normal metal, we find an enhanced local density of states close to the normal-metal–superconductor interface. The sharp peak in the density is pinned to the Fermi energy and leads to spontaneous paramagnetic interface currents. ...

We consider the superfluid density s T in a two-band superconductor with sign-changing extended s-wave symmetry s+ in the presence of nonmagnetic impurities and apply the results to Fe-pnictides. We show that the behavior of the superfluid density is essentially the same as in an ordinary s-wave superconductor with magnetic impurities. We show that, for moderate to strong interband impurity sca...