English

Cross-over from retro to specular Andreev reflections in bilayer graphene

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2016-08-10 v1 Superconductivity

Abstract

Ongoing experimental progress in the preparation of ultra-clean graphene/superconductor (SC) interfaces enabled the recent observation of specular interband Andreev reflections (AR) at bilayer graphene (BLG)/NbSe2_{2} van der Waals interfaces [Nature Physics 12, (2016)]. Motivated by this experiment we theoretically study the differential conductance across a BLG/SC interface at the continuous transition from high to ultra-low Fermi energies EFE_{F} in BLG. Using the Bogoliubov-deGennes equations and the Blonder-Tinkham-Klapwijk formalism we derive analytical expressions for the differential conductance across the BLG/SC interface. We find a characteristic signature of the cross-over from intra-band retro- (high EFE_{F}) to inter-band specular (low EFE_{F}) ARs, that manifests itself in a strongly suppressed interfacial conductance when the excitation energy ε=EF<Δ|\varepsilon |=|E_{F}|<\Delta (the SC gap). The sharpness of these conductance dips is strongly dependent on the size of the potential step at the BLG/SC interface U0U_{0}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1605.04254,
  title  = {Cross-over from retro to specular Andreev reflections in bilayer graphene},
  author = {Dmitri K. Efetov and Konstantin B. Efetov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1605.04254},
  year   = {2016}
}