Superconducting proximity effect and order parameter fluctuations in disordered and quasiperiodic systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how superconductivity penetrates into disordered and quasicrystalline wires, revealing different decay behaviors and large fluctuations of the order parameter depending on the electronic state nature.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of the proximity effect in inhomogeneous systems using self-consistent Bogoliubov-de Gennes calculations, highlighting the impact of extended, localized, and critical states.

Findings

Power-law decay of order parameter in extended and critical states

Stretched exponential decay in localized states

Self-similarity of order parameter in quasicrystalline systems

Abstract

We study the superconducting proximity effect in inhomogeneous systems in which a disordered or quasicrystalline normal-state wire is connected to a BCS superconductor. We self-consistently compute the local superconducting order parameters in the real space Bogoliubov-de Gennes framework for three cases, namely, when states are i) extended, ii) localized or iii) critical. The results show that the spatial decay of the superconducting order parameter as one moves away from the normal-superconductor interface is power law in cases i) and iii), stretched exponential in case ii). In the quasicrystalline case, we observe self-similarity in the spatial modulation of the proximity-induced superconducting order parameter. To characterize fluctuations, which are large in these systems, we study the distribution functions of the order parameter at the center of the normal region. These are Gaussian functions of the variable (case i) or of its logarithm (cases ii and iii). We give arguments to explain the characteristics of the distributions and their scaling with system size for each of the three cases.