Eur. Phys. J. B 51, 285-292 (2006)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2006-00218-6

Thermoelectric effects in superconducting nanostructures

¹ A.F. Ioffe Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, 194021 Saint Petersburg, Russia
² Department of Physics, Umeå University, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden

Corresponding author: ^a Shelankov@tp.umu.se

Received: 3 January 2006
Revised: 7 April 2006
Published online: 2 June 2006

Abstract

We study thermoelectric effects in superconducting nanobridges and demonstrate that the magnitude of these effects can be comparable or even larger than that for a macroscopic circuit. It is shown that a large gradient of the electron temperature can be realistically created on a nanoscale and the masking effects due to spurious magnetic fields can be minimised in nanostructures. For these reasons, nanodevices can provide an interesting possibility to study the thermoelectric effect in superconductors.