Related papers: Parity-Affected Superconductivity in Ultrasmall Me…
We examine the destruction of superconducting pairing in metallic grains as their size is decreased for both even and odd numbers of electrons. This occurs when the average level spacing d is of the same order as the BCS order parameter.…
We study pairing correlations in ultrasmall superconductor in the nanoscopic limit by means of a toy model where electrons are confined in a single, multiply degenerate energy level. We solve the model exactly to investigate the temperature…
We study the superconductivity in small grains in the regime when the quantum level spacing $\delta\varepsilon$ is comparable to the gap $\Delta$. As $\delta\varepsilon$ is increased, the system crosses over from superconducting to normal…
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…
Generalized BCS equations which consistently include the projection on the particle-number parity are derived from a systematic variational method. Numerical solutions are given that are illustrative of ultra-small metallic grains. Compared…
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…
Recently, it has been possible to construct single-electron transistors to study electronic properties, including superconductivity, in metallic grains of nanometer size. Among several theoretical results are suppression of…
We investigate superconductivity in a grand canonical ensemble with {\it fixed number parity} (even or odd). In the low temperature limit we find small corrections to the BCS gap equation and energy spectrum $E(k)$. The even-odd free energy…
Superconductivity in small metallic specimens is studied with regard to the size dependence of the "parity gap" (Delta_P), a parameter distinguishing between the energy of even and odd number of electrons in the granule. Delta_P is shown to…
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 study the spin susceptibility chi of a small, isolated superconducting grain. Due to the interplay between parity effects and pairing correlations, the dependence of chi on temperature T is qualitatively different from the standard BCS…
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 study the magnetic-field-induced breakdown of superconductivity in nm-scale metal grains having a mean electron level spacing $d \simeq \tilde\Delta$ (bulk gap). Using a generalized variational BCS approach that yields good qualitative…
The Richardson exact solution for the reduced BCS Hamiltonian is applied to examine how sensitive are the pairing characteristics (condensation energy, spectroscopic gap, parity gap) to a specific configuration of single-electron energy…
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,…
The parity effect in an ultra-small superconducting grain is examined. By applying a generalized version of Lieb's spin-reflection positivity technique, we show rigorously that the parity parameter $\Delta_P$ is nonvanishing in such a…
Studies of pairing correlations in ultrasmall metallic grains have commonly been based on a simple reduced BCS-model describing the scattering of pairs of electrons between discrete energy levels that come in time-reversed pairs. This model…
Matveev and Larkin calculated the parity effect on the ground state energy of a small superconducting particle in the regimes where the mean level spacing is either large or small compared to the bulk gap. We perform a numerical calculation…
The superconducting pairing instability---as determined by a divergence of the two-particle susceptibility---is obtained in the mean field (BCS) approximation in the thermodynamic limit. The usual practice is to examine this property for a…
We study the effect of the chemical potential on the results of the BCS theory of superconductivity. We assume that the pairing interaction is manifested between electrons of single-particle energies in an interval $[\mu - \hbar\omega_c,…