Quasiparticle transport and induced superconductivity in InAs-AlSb quantum wells with Nb electrodes

Abstract Current transport through InAs-AlSb quantum wells contacted with superconducting Nb electrodes shows strong evidence for the presence of multiple Andreev reflections (AR's). The efficiency of the multiple AR process is greatly enhanced by the specular normal reflection of electrons at the backplane of the quantum well, thereby permitting multiple AR attempts. Superconductivity observed for sufficiently narrow inter-electrode gaps is interpreted as the result of phase-coherent multiple AR's. Series-connected multi-junction InAs-Nb arrays have been constructed by contracting the InAs-AlSb quantum well with a periodic grating of superconducting Nb electrodes with sub-micrometer spacings. They showed superconductivity at sufficiently low temperatures, in one case as high as 4.2 K. Above the transition temperatures, strong precursors of the superconductivity were observed, in the form of dramatically enhanced zero-bias conductances, decreasing with increasing temperature, but larger by about a factor on the order 10 4 than the fluctuation-induced precursors of thin BCS films. Weak magnetic fields restored non-zero resistance values; the increase in resistance with increasing magnetic field contained a component periodic in the magnetic field, with a period corresponding to a flux per grating cell of only a fraction ( ≈ 1 5 − 1 2 ) of a conventional flux quantum. The observations are interpreted in terms of the formation of a flux cell superlattice.