Luminescence and squeezing of a superconducting light-emitting diode

We investigate a semiconductor p-n junction in contact with superconducting leads that is operated under forward bias as a light-emitting diode. The presence of superconductivity results in a significant increase of the electroluminescence in a sharp frequency window. We demonstrate that the tunneli...

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Veröffentlicht in:Physical review. B, Condensed matter and materials physics Condensed matter and materials physics, 2015-05, Vol.91 (20), Article 205303
Hauptverfasser: Hlobil, Patrik, Orth, Peter P.
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:We investigate a semiconductor p-n junction in contact with superconducting leads that is operated under forward bias as a light-emitting diode. The presence of superconductivity results in a significant increase of the electroluminescence in a sharp frequency window. We demonstrate that the tunneling of Cooper pairs induces an additional luminescence peak on resonance. There is a transfer of superconducting to photonic coherence that results in the emission of entangled photon pairs and squeezing of the fluctuations in the quadrature amplitudes of the emitted light. We show that the squeezing angle can be electrically manipulated by changing the relative phase of the order parameters in the superconductors. We finally derive the conditions for lasing in the system and show that the laser threshold is reduced due to superconductivity. This reveals how the macroscopic coherence of a superconductor can be used to control the properties of light.
ISSN:1098-0121
1550-235X
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevB.91.205303