Electronic Shell Structure of Nanoscale Superconductors

Abstract

Motivated by recent experiments on Al nanoparticles, we have studied the effects of fixed electron number and small size in nanoscale superconductors, by applying the canonical BCS theory for the attractive Hubbard model in two and three dimensions. A negative ``gap'' in particles with an odd number of electrons as observed in the experiments is obtained in our canonical scheme. For particles with an even number of electrons, the energy gap exhibits shell structure as a function of electron density or system size in the weak-coupling regime: the gap is particularly large for ``magic numbers'' of electrons for a given system size or of atoms for a fixed electron density. The grand canonical BCS method essentially misses this feature. Possible experimental methods for observing such shell effects are discussed.