Quasiparticle cooling using a Topological insulator-Superconductor hybrid junction

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the thermoelectric properties of a hybrid junction realised coupling surface states of a three-dimensional topological insulator with a conventional $s$-wave superconductor. We focus on the ballistic devices and study the quasiparticle flow, carrying both electric and thermal currents, adopting a scattering matrix approach based on conventional Blonder-Tinkham-Klapwijk formalism. We calculate the cooling efficiency of the junction as a function of the microscopic parameters of the normal region (i.e. the chemical potential etc.). The cooling power increases when moving from a regime of Andreev specular-reflection to a regime where Andreev retro-reflection dominates. Differently from the case of a conventional N/S interface, we can achieve efficient cooling of the normal region, without including any explicit impurity scattering at the interface, to increase normal reflection.

9 pages, 5 figures

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Superconducting proximity effect in $d$-wave cuprate/ graphene heterostructures
• Thermoelectric processes of quantum normal-superconductor interfaces
• A Green's function approach to Topological Insulator junctions with magnetic and superconducting regions