Related papers: Superconducting fluctuations in small grains - the…
We review recent experimental and theoretical work on superconductivity in ultrasmall metallic grains, i.e. grains sufficiently small that the conduction electron energy spectrum becomes discrete. The discrete excitation spectrum of an…
A nano-scale metallic grain (nanoparticle) with irregular boundaries in which the single-particle dynamics are chaotic is a zero-dimensional system described by the so-called universal Hamiltonian in the limit of a large number of…
We study the thermodynamic properties of a small superconducting metallic grain using a quantum Monte Carlo method. The grain is described by the universal Hamiltonian, containing pairing and ferromagnetic exchange correlations. In…
We summarize the present status of the theories of spin fluctuations in dealing with the anomalous or non-Fermi liquid behavior and unconventional superconductivity in strongly correlated electron systems around their magnetic instabilities…
We study finite size effects in superconducting metallic grains and determine the BCS order parameter and the low energy excitation spectrum in terms of size, and shape of the grain. Our approach combines the BCS self-consistency condition,…
We review the effects of electron-electron interactions on the ground-state spin and the transport properties of ultra-small chaotic metallic grains. Our studies are based on an effective Hamiltonian that combines a superconducting BCS-like…
A nano-scale metallic grain in which the single-particle dynamics are chaotic is described by the so-called universal Hamiltonian. This Hamiltonian includes a superconducting pairing term and a ferromagnetic exchange term that compete with…
We study the fluctuation conductivity of superconducting granular metals at low temperatures and strong magnetic field destroying the Cooper pairs. Explicit calculations are performed for larger values of the coupling between the grains…
The reduced BCS Hamiltonian for a metallic grain with a finite number of electrons is considered. The crossover between the ultrasmall regime, in which the level spacing, $d$, is larger than the bulk superconducting gap, $\Delta$, and the…
We use two truly canonical approaches to describe superconductivity in ultrasmall metallic grains: (a) a variational fixed-N projected BCS-like theory and (b) an exact solution of the model Hamiltonian developed by Richardson in context…
For assemblies of superconductor nanograins, the magnetic response is analyzed as a function of both temperature and magnetic field. In order to describe the interaction energy of electron pairs for a huge number of many-particle states,…
We develop a theory of superconductivity in ultrasmall (nm-scale) metallic grains having a discrete electronic eigenspectrum with a mean level spacing of order of the bulk gap. The theory is based on calculating the eigenspectrum using a…
We study the thermodynamics of ultrasmall metallic grains with the mean level spacing comparable or larger than the pairing correlation energy in the whole range of temperatures. A complete picture of the thermodynamics in such systems is…
Motivated by recent experiments reporting superconductivity only at very low temperature in a class of heavy fermion compounds, we study the impact of energy fluctuations with small momentum transfer on the pairing instability near an…
We present a truly canonical theory of superconductivity in ultrasmall metallic grains by variationally optimizing fixed-N projected BCS wave-functions, which yields the first full description of the entire crossover from the bulk BCS…
We study the thermodynamics of ultrasmall metallic grains with level spacing $\delta$ comparable or smaller than the pairing correlation energy, at finite temperatures, $T \gsim \delta$. We describe a method which allows to find quantum…
The magnetoresistance of a granular superconductor in a strong magnetic field is considered. It is assumed that this field destroys the superconducting gap in each grain, such that all interesting effects considered in the paper are due to…
Attempts to explain correlated-electron superconductivity have largely focused on the proximity of the superconducting state to antiferromagnetism. Yet, there exist many correlated-electron systems that exhibit insulator-superconducting…
Superconducting transitions are driven by thermal fluctuations close to the transition temperature, Tc. These fluctuations are averaged out in global measurements, leaving imprints on susceptibility and resistance measurements. Here, we use…
Spin dependent transport in a ferromagnet/superconductor/ferromagnet single electron transistor is studied theoretically with spin accumulation, spin relaxation, gap suppression, and charging effects taken into account. A strong dependence…