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Published July 15, 2019 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Proximity-induced gap in nanowires with a thin superconducting shell

Abstract

Coupling a normal-metal wire to a superconductor induces an excitation gap Δ_(ind) in the normal metal. In the absence of disorder, the induced excitation gap is strongly suppressed by finite-size effects if the thickness D_S of the superconductor is much smaller than the thickness D_N of the normal metal and the superconducting coherence length ξ. We show that the presence of disorder, either in the bulk or at the exposed surface of the superconductor, significantly enhances the magnitude of Δ_(ind), such that Δ_(ind) approaches the superconducting gap Δ in the limit of strong disorder. We also discuss the shift of energy bands inside the normal-metal wire as a result of the coupling to the superconducting shell.

Additional Information

© 2019 American Physical Society. Received 25 February 2019; revised manuscript received 6 July 2019; published 22 July 2019. We thank Björn Sbierski and Christian Klöckner for discussions. Financial support was provided by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG in the framework of project C03 of the Collaborative Research Center Transregio 183 Entangled States of Matter and by a QuantERA grant. One of us (FvO) thanks the Aspen Center for Physics (supported by National Science Foundation Grant No. PHY-1607611) and the IQIM, an NSF physics frontier center funded in part by the Moore Foundation for hospitality while some of this work was performed.

Attached Files

Published - PhysRevB.100.035426.pdf

Submitted - 1902.09798.pdf

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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October 20, 2023