Crossed Andreev reflection in diffusive contacts.pdf

a r X i v : c o n d - m a t / 0 6 1 1 1 4 4 v 1 [ c o n d - m a t .s u p r - c o n ] 6 N o v 2 0 0 6 Crossed Andreev Reflection in Diffusive Contacts A. Brinkman and A.A. Golubov Faculty of Science and Technology and MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology, University of Twente, 7500 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands (Dated: February 6, 2008) Crossed Andreev reflection in multiterminal structures in the diffusive regime is addressed within the quasiclassical Keldysh-Usadel formalism. The elastic cotunneling and crossed Andreev reflec- tion of quasiparticles give nonlocal currents and voltages (depending on the actual biasing of the devices) by virtue of the induced proximity effect in the normal metal electrodes. The magnitude of the nonlocal processes is found to scale with the square of the barrier transparency and to de- cay exponentially with interface spacing. Nonlocal cotunneling and crossed Andreev conductances are found to contribute equally to the nonlocal current, which is of relevance to the use of normal metal-superconducting heterostructures as sources of entanglement. PACS numbers: 03.67.Mn, 73.23.-b, 74.45.+c, 74.78.Na I. INTRODUCTION In standard Andreev reflection at a single normal metal-superconductor interface an electronlike quasipar- ticle in the normal metal can be transformed into a hole- like quasiparticle of opposite momentum.1 When two normal metal (N) electrodes or ferromagnets (F ) are at- tached to a superconductor (S) at a distance from each other of the order of the coherence length, two addi- tional nonlocal processes are possible. During elastic co- tunneling (EC), an electron is transferred from one elec- trode to the other, while for crossed Andreev reflection (CAR) an electron in one of the electrodes is transformed into a hole in the other electrode.2,3 Bell-inequality experiments, quantum computation, and teleportation of quantum states require quantum ob- jects that are entangled. Cooper pairs in superconductors are spin singlet