2013/11/26 by A. Glatz, Andreas Glatz, A. A. Varlamov +4
Physics and Astronomy · #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Quantum many-body systems #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1311.6548
13 pages, 6 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1210.4206
arxiv created 2013/11/26 · arxiv updated 2013/11/27
Electron tunneling spectroscopy pioneered by Esaki and Giaever offered a powerful tool for studying electronic spectra and density of states (DOS) in superconductors. This led to important discoveries that revealed, in particular, the pseudogap in the tunneling spectrum of superconductors above their critical temperatures. However, the phenomenological approach is insufficient for describing the does not resolve the fine structure of low-bias behavior carrying significant information about electron scattering, interactions, and decoherence effects. Here we construct a complete microscopic theory of electron tunneling into a superconductor in the fluctuation regime. We reveal a non-trivial low-energy anomaly in tunneling conductivity due to Andreev-like reflection of injected electrons from superconducting fluctuations. Our findings enable real-time observation of fluctuating Cooper pairs dynamics by time-resolved scanning tunneling microscopy measurements and open new horizons for quantitative analysis of the fluctuation electronic spectra of superconductors.