Eduard Driessen
who is presently a postoc in Grenoble with Claude Chapelier has given a talk yesterday. He reported very recent results on low-temperature STM experiments with superconducting nanowires. It is a tremendous technical challenge he has overcame.
The results were many and various. Some were pretty familiar and irritating like the incomplete gap in this disordered superconductor: the thing that has an explanation, yet the explanation so primitive and far-fetched that you feel yourself ashamed that you can’t do it better. Some were generation-binding: the hot spots in superconducting wires have been hot topic in 70s when Eduard’s former supervisors Hans Mooij and Teun Klapwijk were at his stage of the career, and STM experiments of Eduard just neatly visualized the intimate structure of these spots.
Some were teasingly interesting. Eduard pushed a 1nA – tiny – current to the STM and observed a gigantic suppression of the critical current in the nanowire. It is like you add an extra droplet to a river stream – and it does not flow anymore. These droplets must be quasiparticles.
The result suggests that the quasiparticles accumulate being added at a rate of 10^7 per second. This is thus about slow quasiparticle dynamics – a topic of my long interest
