Transport through quantum coherent conductors, such as atomic junctions, is described by conduction channels. Information about the number of channels and their transmissions can be extracted from various sources, such as multiple Andreev reflections, dyna ...
Magnetic impurities on superconductors induce discrete bound levels inside the superconducting gap, known as Yu-Shiba-Rusinov (YSR) states. YSR levels are fully spin polarized such that the tunneling between YSR states depends on their relative spin orient ...
Spin-dependent scattering from magnetic impurities inside a superconductor gives rise to Yu-Shiba-Rusinov (YSR) states within the superconducting gap. They can be modeled by the largely equivalent Kondo or Anderson impurity models. The role of the magnetic ...
The Josephson effect in scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) is an excellent tool to probe the properties of a superconductor on a local scale. We use atomic manipulation in a low temperature STM to create mesoscopic single channel contacts and study the Jo ...
This thesis contains two major topics, the restriction of tunneling to only a few channels in the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and the interaction of local magnetic impurities with superconductivity. At a temperature of 15mK, the quantum back-action ...
Robust quantum systems rely on having a protective environment with minimized relaxation channels. Super-conducting gaps play an important role in the design of such environments. The interaction of localized single spins with a conventional superconductor ...