Cooper pair tunnelling into a Quantum Hall fluid

Abstract

Transport through a tunnel junction connecting a superconductor to a spin-aligned quantum Hall fluid at filling $\nu$ is studied theoretically. The dominant transport channel at low temperatures is the tunnelling of Cooper pairs into edge states of the quantum Hall fluid. This process, which is greatly suppressed at low energies due to both Coulomb and Pauli exclusion effects, leads to a tunnelling conductance which vanishes with temperature as $T^{4/\nu -2}$, for $\nu^{-1}$ an odd integer. For integer fillings with $\nu >1$ the "Pauli blockade" is circumvented and a non-vanishing conductance is predicted.