Dephasing of Cooper pairs and subgap electron transport in superconducting hybrids

Abstract

We argue that electron-electron interactions fundamentally restrict the penetration length of Cooper pairs into a diffusive normal metal (N) from a superconductor (S). At low temperatures this Cooper pair dephasing length $L_{\phi }$ remains finite and does not diverge at $T\to 0$. We evaluate the subgap conductance of NS hybrids in the presence of electron-electron interactions and demonstrate that this new length $L_{\phi }$ can be directly extracted from conductance measurements in such structures.

5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Quantum decoherence of interacting electrons in arrays of quantum dots and diffusive conductors
• Weak localization in a system with a barrier: Dephasing and weak Coulomb blockade

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Microwave Admittance of Gold-Palladium Nanowires with Proximity-Induced Superconductivity
• Supercurrent dephasing by electron-electron interactions
• Phase-coherent thermoelectricity and non-equilibrium Josephson current in Andreev interferometers