Parity Effect in a mesoscopic superconducting ring

Abstract

We study a mesoscopic superconducting ring threaded by a magnetic flux when the single particle level spacing is not negligible. It is shown that, for a superconducting ring with even parity, the behavior of persistent current is equivalent to what is expected in a bulk superconducting ring. On the other hand, we find that a ring with odd parity shows anomalous behavior such as fluxoid quantization at half-integral multiples of the flux quantum and paramagnetic response at low temperature. We also discuss how the parity effect in the persistent current disappears as the temperature is raised or as the size of the ring increases.

8 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Europhys. Lett

References in corpus (5)

• A small superconducting grain in the canonical ensemble
• Fixed-N Superconductivity: The Crossover from the Bulk to the Few-Electron Limit
• Superconductivity in Ultrasmall Metallic Grains
• Transport through an Interacting Quantum Dot Coupled to Two Superconducting Leads
• Photon-Assisted Quasiparticle Transport and Andreev Transport through an Interacting Quantum Dot

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Superconductivity in one dimension
• Influence of Topological Edge States on the Properties of Al/Bi2Se3/Al Hybrid Josephson Devices
• Optimizing the Majorana character of SQUIDs with topologically non-trivial barriers
• Parity-Affected Persistent Currents in Superconducting Nanorings
• Parity effect and spontaneous currents in superconducting nanorings