Magnetic field and contact resistance dependence of non-local charge imbalance.

Crossed Andreev reflection (CAR) in metallic nanostructures, a possible basis for solid-state electron entangler devices, is usually investigated by detecting non-local voltages in multi-terminal superconductor/normal metal devices. This task is difficult because other subgap processes may mask the effects of CAR. One of these processes is the generation of charge imbalance (CI) and the diffusion of non-equilibrium quasi-particles in the superconductor. Here we demonstrate a characteristic dependence of non-local CI on a magnetic field applied parallel to the superconducting wire, which can be understood by a generalization of the standard description of CI to non-local experiments. These results can be used to distinguish CAR and CI and to extract CI relaxation times in superconducting nanostructures. In addition, we investigate the dependence of non-local CI on the resistance of the injector and detector contacts and demonstrate a quantitative agreement with a recent theory using only material and junction characteristics extracted from separate direct measurements.

Fluctuations of persistent current.

We theoretically analyze equilibrium fluctuations of the persistent current (PC) in nanorings. We demonstrate that these fluctuations persist down to zero temperature provided the current operator does not commute with the total Hamiltonian of the system. For a model of a quantum particle on a ring we explicitly evaluate PC noise power which has the form of sharp peaks at frequencies set by the corresponding interlevel distances. In rings with many conducting channels, a much smoother and broader PC noise spectrum is expected. A specific feature of PC noise is that its spectrum can be tuned by an external magnetic flux indicating the presence of quantum coherence in the system.

Coulomb interaction and quantum transport through a coherent scatterer.

An interplay between charge discreteness, coherent scattering, and Coulomb interaction yields nontrivial effects in quantum transport. We derive a real-time effective action and an equivalent quantum Langevin equation for an arbitrary coherent scatterer and evaluate its current-voltage characteristics in the presence of interactions. Within our model, at large conductances G0 and low T (but outside the instanton-dominated regime), the interaction correction to G0 saturates and causes conductance suppression by a universal factor which depends only on the type of the conductor.