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S Pilgram

Publications and source records attributed to S Pilgram.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

Role of inelastic tunneling through the insulating barrier in scanning-tunneling-microscope experiments on cuprate superconductors.

The tunneling path between the CuO2 layers in cuprate superconductors and a scanning-tunneling-microscope tip passes through a barrier made from other oxide layers. This opens up the possibility that inelastic processes in the barrier contribute to the tunneling spectra. Such processes cause one or possibly more peaks in the second derivative current-voltage spectra displaced by phonon energies from the density of states singularity associated with superconductivity. Calculations of inelastic processes generated by apical O phonons show good qualitative agreement with recent experiments reported by Lee et al. Further tests to discriminate between these inelastic processes and coupling to planar phonons are proposed.

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Full-counting statistics for voltage and dephasing probes.

We present a stochastic path integral method to calculate the full-counting statistics of conductors with energy conserving dephasing probes and dissipative voltage probes. The approach is explained for the experimentally important case of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, but is easily generalized to more complicated setups. For all geometries where dephasing may be modeled by a single one-channel dephasing probe we prove that our method yields the same full-counting statistics as phase averaging of the cumulant generating function.

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Noise and full counting statistics of incoherent multiple Andreev reflection.

We present a general theory for the full counting statistics of multiple Andreev reflections in incoherent superconducting-normal-superconducting contacts. The theory, based on a stochastic path integral approach, is applied to a superconductor-double-barrier system. It is found that all cumulants of the current show a pronounced subharmonic gap structure at voltages V=2Delta/en. For low voltages V< or =3. We show that this low-voltage result holds for a large class of incoherent superconducting-normal-superconducting contacts.

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Frequency scales for current statistics of mesoscopic conductors.

We calculate the third cumulant of current in a chaotic cavity with contacts of arbitrary transparency as a function of frequency. Its frequency dependence drastically differs from that of the conventional noise. In addition to a dispersion at the inverse RC time characteristic of charge relaxation, it has a low-frequency dispersion at the inverse dwell time of electrons in the cavity. This effect is suppressed if both contacts have either large or small transparencies.

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Stochastic path integral formulation of full counting statistics.

We derive a stochastic path integral representation of counting statistics in semiclassical systems. The formalism is introduced on the simple case of a single chaotic cavity with two quantum point contacts, and then further generalized to find the propagator for charge distributions with an arbitrary number of counting fields and generalized charges. The counting statistics is given by the saddle-point approximation to the path integral, and fluctuations around the saddle point are suppressed in the semiclassical approximation. We use this approach to derive the current cumulants of a chaotic cavity in the hot-electron regime.

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Efficiency of mesoscopic detectors.

We consider a mesoscopic measuring device whose conductance is sensitive to the state of a two-level system. The detector is described with the help of its scattering matrix. Its elements can be used to calculate the relaxation and decoherence times of the system, and determine the characteristic time for a reliable measurement. We derive conditions needed for an efficient ratio of decoherence and measurement times. To illustrate the theory we discuss the distribution function of the efficiency of an ensemble of open chaotic cavities.

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