How cold is the junction of a millikelvin scanning tunnelling microscope?

Taner Esat; Xiaosheng Yang; Farhad Mustafayev; Helmut Soltner; F. Stefan Tautz; Ruslan Temirov

doi:10.1038/s42005-023-01201-4

How cold is the junction of a millikelvin scanning tunnelling microscope?

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2023-07-11 v1

Authors: Taner Esat , Xiaosheng Yang , Farhad Mustafayev , Helmut Soltner , F. Stefan Tautz , Ruslan Temirov

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Abstract

We employ a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) cooled to millikelvin temperatures by an adiabatic demagnetization refrigerator (ADR) to perform scanning tunnelling spectroscopy (STS) on an atomically clean surface of Al(100) in a superconducting state using normal-metal and superconducting STM tips. Varying the ADR temperatures between 30 mK and 1.2 K, we show that the temperature of the STM junction $T$ is decoupled from the temperature of the surrounding environment $T_{\mathrm{env}}$ . Simulating the STS data with the $P(E)$ theory, we determine that $T_{\mathrm{env}} \approx 1.5$ K, while the fitting of the superconducting gap spectrum yields the lowest $T=77$ mK.

Keywords

scanning tunnelling microscope millikelvin adiabatic demagnetization refrigerator scanning tunnelling spectroscopy superconducting gap p(e) theory

Cite

@article{arxiv.2210.11908,
  title  = {How cold is the junction of a millikelvin scanning tunnelling microscope?},
  author = {Taner Esat and Xiaosheng Yang and Farhad Mustafayev and Helmut Soltner and F. Stefan Tautz and Ruslan Temirov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.11908},
  year   = {2023}
}

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12 pages, 10 figures

How cold is the junction of a millikelvin scanning tunnelling microscope?

Abstract

Keywords

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