表題番号:2020C-518 日付:2024/04/18
研究課題ボース・アインシュタイン凝縮体におけるメゾスコピック輸送現象
研究者所属(当時) 資格 氏名
(代表者) 高等研究所 講師 内野 瞬
研究成果概要

In mesoscopic transport phenomena through small constrictions, quantum mechanical effects are known to be directly reflected in transport coefficients. One of the best known is the Landauer formula in which the two-terminal conductance of normal metals is quantized.


In addition, states of matter in reservoirs play an important role in mesoscopic transport. The prototype example is a superconducting point contact where reservoirs consist of superconductors. In this case, it is known that the direct current does not obey Ohm’s law. The key ingredient there is multiple Andreev reflections where quasiparticles repeat Andreev reflections at the boundaries between superconductor and contact. As a result, the current-bias characteristics become highly nonlinear.


In contrast, each constituent particle in detail is expected to be irrelevant in mesoscopic transport. This type of universality can nowadays be confirmed with ultracold atomic gases. Indeed, a two-terminal transport setup with a quantum point contact has been realized in experiments of ultracold Fermi gases that observed the conductance quantization and nonlinear current-bias characteristics.


It must be noted that the presence or absence of charge may cause a difference in transport between electron and atomic systems. Especially, this difference may qualitatively be important for systems with Bose- Einstein condensation of Cooper pairs where Nambu-Goldstone (NG) modes emerge due to spontaneous symmetry breaking. In the case of electrons, the NG modes become gapped ones due to the Coulomb interaction. In the case of neutral atoms, however, these NG modes remain gapless, and the NG modes may play an important role in low-energy transport. At the same time, as the NG modes are a non-superfluid component, there is a view that the effects of such modes are negligible at low temperature. Since the NG mode in mesoscopic transport have yet to be incorporated in an explicit manner, it is not clear whether it is reasonable to neglect the effect of the gapless mode in experiments of ultracold atomic gases.


By using the effective theory and tunneling Hamiltonian, we have discussed DC transport of the NG modes in the fermionic superfluid point contact. We have focused on the BCS regime and revealed the anomalous contribution in mass transport, which is the conversion process between the condensate and NG mode. We also discussed that the anomalous contribution is not present in heat transport, which gives rise to breakdown of the Wiedemann-Franz law and the absence of the bunching effect in current noise.