Related papers: Parity effect in a small superconducting grain: A …
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…
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…
We investigate the breakdown of BCS superconductivity in {\em ultra}\/small metallic grains as a function of particle size (characterized by the mean spacing $d$ between discrete electronic eigenstates), and the parity ($P$ = even/odd) of…
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 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…
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…
Short-range antiferromagnetic correlations are known to open a spin gap in the repulsive Hubbard model on ladders with $M$ legs, when $M$ is even. We show that the spin gap originates from the formation of correlated pairs of electrons with…
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…
We study the Kondo effect in an ultrasmall metallic grain, i.e. small enough to have a discrete energy-level spectrum, by calculating the susceptibility chi of the magnetic impurity. Our quantum Monte Carlo simulations, and analytic…
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 report on an exploration of the mean-field phase diagram for Pauli-limited superconductivity in small metallic grains. Emphasis is placed on the crossover from the ultra-small grain limit where superconductivity disappears to the bulk…
We study a mesoscopic superconducting ring threaded by a magnetic flux when the single particle level spacing is not negligible. It is shown that, for a superconducting ring with even parity, the behavior of persistent current is equivalent…
How small superconductors can be? For isolated nanoparticles subject to quantum size effects, P.W. Anderson conjectured in 1959 that superconductivity could only exist when the electronic level spacing $\delta$ is smaller than the…
We develop a quantitative analytic theory that accurately describes the odd-even effect observed experimentally in a one-dimensional, trapped Fermi gas with a small number of particles [G. Z\"urn et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 175302…
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…
By means of the Lanczos method we analyze superconducting correlations in ultrasmall grains at fixed particle number. We compute the ground state properties and the excitation gap of the pairing Hamiltonian as a function of the level…
We show that in ultra-small superconducting grains any concentration of magnetic impurities or infinitely small orbital effect of magnetic field leads to destruction of the hard gap in the tunneling density of states. Instead, though…
Unlike bulk superconductivity, where one energy scale, the energy gap, characterizes pairing correlations, we show that in small superconducting grains there exist two different such quantities. The first characterizes cumulative properties…
The problem of the survival of superconductivity in a small super-conducting grain placed in a metal substrate is addressed. For this aim the pair correlations and super-conducting gap around and inside a negative-U impurity in one and two…
Small superconducting grains are discussed in the frameworks of both the reduced BCS Hamiltonian and the Universal Hamiltonian. It is shown that fluctuations of electrons in levels far from the Fermi energy dominate superconducting…