Charge Imbalance in a Layered Structure of High Temperature Superconductors

Abstract

Quasiparticle injection devices are considered as one of the candidates for the high temperature superconductor transistors, which can operate at liquid nitrogen temperatures. In these devices the nonequilibrium effects are created by injecting quasiparticle current into a stack of intrinsic Josephson junctions (IJJs). These effects lead to an occurrence of a shift of the condensate chemical potential and a difference in the distribution between the electron-like and the hole-like quasiparticles that causes a charge imbalance. Such effects are observed in many experiments for both bulk and layered superconductors. In this paper, we study non-stationary nonequilibrium charge imbalance effect due to current injection in a stack of IJJs. We investigate the effect of the charge imbalance on the current-voltage characteristic (IVC) and the time dependence of the voltage and the quasiparticle potential in a stack of five IJJs.