Spectroscopic Signatures of Gate-Controlled Superconducting Phases

Abstract

We investigate the tunneling conductance of superconductor-insulator-normal metal (SIN) and superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) heterostructures with one superconducting side of the junction that is electrically driven and can exhibit $\pi$-pairing through a modification of the surface inversion asymmetric couplings. In SIN tunneling we find that the variation of the electrically driven interactions generally brings an increase of quasi-particles in the gap due to orbitally polarized depaired states, irrespective of the inter-band phase rearrangement. The peak of SIN conductance at the gap edge varies with a trend that depends both on the strength of the surface interactions as well as on the character of the gate-induced superconducting state. While this shift can be also associated with thermal effects in the SIN configuration, for the SIS geometry at low temperature the electric field does not yield the characteristic matching peak at voltages related with the difference between the gaps of the superconducting electrodes. This observation sets out a distinctive mark for spectroscopically distinguishing the thermal population effects from the quantum gate-driven signatures. In SIS the electrostatic gating yields a variety of features with asymmetric peaks and broadening of the conductance spectral weight. These findings indicate general qualitative trends for both SIN and SIS tunneling spectroscopy which could serve to evaluate the impact of gate-control on superconductors and the occurrence of non-centrosymmetric orbital antiphase pairing.

15 pages, 8 panels of figures

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Gate-controlled supercurrent in epitaxial Al/InAs nanowires
• Destroying superconductivity in thin films with an electric field
• Magneto-topological transitions in multicomponent superconductors
• Zero magnetic-field orbital vortices in s-wave spin-singlet superconductors
• Particle-hole spectral asymmetry at the edge of multiorbital noncentrosymmetric superconductors