Impact of electrostatic fields in layered crystalline BCS superconductors

Abstract

Motivated by recent experiments reporting the suppression of the critical current in superconducting Dayem bridges by the application of strong electrostatic fields, in this work we study the impact on the superconducting gap of charge redistribution in response to an applied electric field in thin crystalline metals. By numerically solving the BCS gap equation and the Poisson equation in a fully self-consistent way, we find that by reducing the pairing strength we observe an increased sensitivity of the gap on the applied field, showing sudden rises and falls that are compatible with surface modifications of the local density of states. The effect is washed out by increasing the pairing strength towards the weak-to-moderate coupling limit or by introduction of a weak smearing in the density of states, showing the evolution from a clean crystal to a weakly disordered metal.