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# Methods of electron beam bunching

## 1 Introduction

The production of short period trains of electron bunches (electron multilayer mirrors) is very important for the solution of the problem of compact, stable, monochromatic, diffraction limited prebunched FELs in the mm to X-ray regions.

Prebunched FELs were suggested by V.L.Ginsburg in 1947 and named ”Sources of Coherent Undulator Radiation (UR)” . The terms parametric and prebunched FELs appeared later . H.Motz performed the first experiments on generation of coherent UR in 1953 . R.M.Phillips generated stimulated UR in a conventional FEL in the RF region in 1960 . In the early 1970’s interest in prebunched FELs was renewed , .

Bunched electron beams of length $`0.1÷1`$ mm are produced in klystron bunchers (KB) and radio-frequency accelerators . The basic components of a KB is an RF cavity followed by a drift space. The cavity is excited to the $`TM_{010}`$ mode. The electron beam at the exit of the buncher receives sinusoidal energy modulation. After the drift space the electron beam will be bunched due to the acquired velocity modulation.

A simple way to produce a bunched beam is to pass a continuous beam through a chopper, where the beam is deflected across a narrow slit or a system of slits, resulting in a pulsed beam behind the slit. The chopper includes an RF cavity excited like the buncher cavity but with the beam port offset by a distance from the cavity axis.

The chopper mode of bunching is rather wasteful. An RF buncher, which concentrates electrons from a large range of phases towards a particular phase is more efficient for electron bunching. However, a chopper produces a beam with higher depth of modulation (clear bunches), does not introduce additional energy spread and can be used for specific reasons. Modern choppers work effectively in the RF region . Schemes of choppers for harder regions can be suggested (see below).

## 2 Undulator bunchers

Short-period trains of bunches are produced in undulator klystron bunchers (UKB). The energy modulation occurs in the undulator and electromagnetic wave fields of the UKB (FEL amplifier configuration) and bunching takes place in a free space . The bunching length in UKB can be shortened if a dispersion section (chicane magnet) follows the undulator. Such a system was called an optical klystron buncher (OKB) .

The wavelength of the wave used in UKB is

$$\lambda _w=\frac{\lambda _u}{2\gamma _s^2}(1+p_{}^2),$$
(1)
where $`p_{}=\sqrt{p_u^2+p_w^2}|_{p_wp_u}p_u`$; $`p_{u(w)}=eB_{u(w)}\lambda _{u(w)}/2\pi mc^2`$ are the transverse electron momenta determined by the electromagnetic fields of the undulator and the electromagnetic wave; $`\lambda _u`$, $`B_u`$ are the period and the magnetic field strength of the undulator; $`B_w`$, the magnetic field strength of the wave; $`\gamma _s=1/\sqrt{1\beta _s^2}=\sqrt{\lambda _u(1+p_{}^2)/4\lambda _w}`$, the relative electron equilibrium energy; $`\beta _s=\sqrt{\beta _s^2+\beta _{zs}^2}`$; $`\beta _s=\beta _{us}+\beta _{ws}=(p_u+p_w)/\gamma _s`$; $`\beta _{zs}=\lambda _u/(\lambda _u+\lambda _w)`$; $`2\pi mc^2/e10700`$ $`Gscm`$; $`e,m`$, the electron charge and mass .

Undulators with high deflection parameters (wigglers) possess high dispersion. If the UKB works in the regime of high deflection parameter and high intensity of the wave (HHKB), the energy modulation and bunching can occur in the same undulator . In HHKB a high degree of bunching occurs if electrons produce a quarter of a period of phase oscillations. The bunching length in this case can be short ($`1`$ m in the optical region, see section 3).

A scheme of bunching based on convergent waves and/or undulators with variable parameters (VPKB) was developed in . In this scheme an electron beam is trapped as a whole in regions less than those limited by separatrices of the FEL amplifier for about 3/4 of a period of phase oscillations (see Fig. 1). Clear bunched beam can be used for high-efficiency generation on the fundamental or higher harmonics in the same undulator or in an undulator radiator. A similar scheme of bunching can occur in cases being developed in -.

Fig. 1: Electron beam at the exit of VPKB in the phase space ($`\epsilon \epsilon _0`$, $`x`$). The amplitude of the laser electric field is $`E_{wm}=E_0(1+\alpha z)`$. $`E_0=180`$ kV/cm, $`\alpha =0.8`$ m-1, $`\lambda _u=1.5`$ cm, the undulator length $`L=5`$ m, $`B_u=3.10^3Gs`$, $`\lambda _w=1.06`$ mkm.

A bunching scheme based on extraction of a series of microbunches from an electron beam located in storage ring buckets when an undulator with variable parameters and electromagnetic wave are used was considered in . Extracted microbunches stay in the storage ring buckets.

Shock acceleration of electron bunches or trains of bunches by wavepackets with a longitudinal component of electric field can lead to their compression. Such schemes can be realized in linear accelerators  and laser wake-field accelerators.

Below, a method of electron-beam bunching and schemes of realization are considered.

## 3 A Method of Electron Beam Bunching

The proposed method is based on production of electron beams in the form of trains of electron bunches, composed in the longitudinal plane in $`N`$ energy layers and followed by rotation of the bunches at a right angle . Rotation converts the bunches into short-period ($`cT_{mb}<\lambda _L/N`$) trains of micro bunches with layers transverse to the beam propagation (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 2: An electron bunch arranged in energy layers in the left bucket is converted after its rotation in the right bucket to a train of micro bunches.

The longitudinal dimension of microbunches will be determined by the energy spread of layers and non linearity of phase oscillations. The influence of the non linearity can be neglected if the phase length of layers is short ($`<\pi `$).

### 3.1 Arrangement of electron beams with energy layers

Example 1. A system of electron beams produced by $`N`$ electron guns of energy $`\epsilon _n=\epsilon _0+n\mathrm{\Delta }\epsilon _l`$ can be arranged in one beam with energy layers by means of a bending magnet (see Fig. 3) . Here $`n=0,1,2,3,\mathrm{}N1`$, $`\mathrm{\Delta }\epsilon _l`$ is the interval between energy layers.

Example 2. A thin electron beam with finite energy spread and low transverse emittance passes through a dispersive magnet and a metal lattice with $`N`$ slits (see Fig. 4). After the lattice, the electron beam is arranged in $`N`$ energy layers111More perfect systems of focusing bending magnets and quadrupole lenses can be used in this scheme..

If the electron beam has a small energy spread and an energy modulation, then this scheme can work in a chopper mode at RF, optical and harder regions.

If the ionization losses of electrons in the medium of a thin lattice are equal to $`\mathrm{\Delta }\epsilon _l/2`$, then electrons of the incoming beam will be arranged in layers without losses.

If electron RF guns in Examples 1,2 produce short bunches, the beam at the exit of systems will be arranged in layers and bunched. The beam can be bunched at the exit of the bending magnet as well. After rotation at the bunching frequency, the beam will be a train of bunches a buncher’s wavelength apart. Bunches will consist of $`N`$ microbunches (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 3: The scheme of arranging an electron beam in energy layers. $`G_1`$, $`G_2`$, $`G_3`$ are the electron guns, $`BM`$ is the bending magnet.

Fig. 4: The scheme of production of the electron beam arranged in layers. $`BM`$ is the bending magnet.

Example 3. Two counter-propagating short laser beams stored in an open resonator perform an interference lattice in a storage ring at a position of low-beta and high dispersion function. A low-emittance electron beam intersects the lattice at a 90 degree angle .

In this case, the energy losses of electrons depend on their position in the laser beam. Electrons moving in the bright zones of fringes lose more energy than those in the dark zones. Their energy (closed orbits) will tend to the energy (closed orbits) of electrons in the nearest dark zones if the energy of scattered quanta $`\mathrm{}\omega _{max}\mathrm{\Delta }\epsilon _l`$. As a result, the electron beam will be arranged in energy layers if the interaction time will be much less than the period of phase oscillations of electrons in the storage ring.

More effective interaction of counterpropagating laser and electron beams can be produced in straight sections of storage rings if $`TEM_{n,\mathrm{\hspace{0.17em}0}}`$ laser mode is used ($`n>1`$).

This scheme of bunching can be realized in ion storage rings using present-day technology (Rayleigh cross-section is $`7÷10`$ orders higher than Compton one) . Realization of the electron version of this scheme depends on the possibility of storing high-power laser beams in high-finesse optical resonators222Note that prebunched Free-Ion Lasers present the ultimate in the capabilities of lasers . Relativistic ion beams can be cooled to a high degree in 6D space ..

### 3.2 Rotation of electron beams in an FEL amplifier

The frequency of phase oscillations of electrons in a helical undulator and a circular polarized laser wave $`\omega _\phi =\omega _u\sqrt{B_uB_w(1+\beta _{zs})}/\beta _{zs}\gamma _sB_c`$, where $`\omega _u=2\pi \beta _{zs}c/\lambda _u`$; $`B_c=2\pi mc^2/e\lambda _u`$ 333We suppose that the laser beam intensity is constant along the interaction region of the laser and electron beams ($`l_{1/4}<2l_R`$, where $`l_R=4\pi \sigma _L^2/\lambda _L`$ is the Rayleigh length)..

Electrons produce a quarter of the period of phase oscillations inside the length

$$l_{1/4}=\frac{\pi c\beta _{zs}}{2\omega _\phi }=\frac{\beta _{zs}\gamma _s}{4}\sqrt{\frac{\lambda _u\lambda _w}{(1+\beta _{zs})p_up_w}}$$

$$=\frac{\lambda _u}{8\sqrt{2}}\sqrt{\frac{1+p_{}^2}{p_up_w}}.$$
(2)
The maximum deviation of the electron energy in the bucket determined by a separatrix is

$$\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }\gamma _{sep}}{\gamma _s}=\frac{2\beta _{zs}\omega _\phi }{(1+\beta _{zs})\omega _u}$$

$$=4\beta zs\sqrt{\frac{p_up_w}{(1+\beta _{zs})(1+p_{}^2)}}.$$
(3)
The magnetic field strength of the circular polarized Gaussian laser beam

$$B_w[Gs]=\sqrt{\frac{2P_w}{c\sigma _l^2}}2.5810^2\sqrt{\frac{P[W]}{\sigma _l^2[cm^2]}}.$$
(4)
Example 4. The parameters of the undulator and electromagnetic laser wave are the following:

laser power $`P_L=1.610^9`$ $`W`$,

laser wavelength $`\lambda =10^4`$ $`cm`$,

laser beam dispersion $`\sigma _L=210^2`$ $`cm`$,

undulator magnetic field $`B_u=10700`$ $`Gs`$,

undulator period $`\lambda _u=3`$ $`cm`$,

deflecting parameter $`p_{}=3`$,

Duration of laser wavepacket $`\tau _l=2.510^{11}sec`$,

energy of laser wavepacket $`\epsilon _l=P_l\tau _l=0.04`$ J,

In this case $`\gamma _s=274`$, $`p_u=3`$, $`p_w=4.8210^3`$, $`l_{1/4}=69.7`$ $`cm`$, $`B_w=5.1610^5`$ $`Gs`$, $`l_R=1.0`$ $`m`$, ($`2l_R>l_{1/4}`$), $`\mathrm{\Delta }\gamma _{sep}/\gamma _s=1.0710^2`$.

## 4 Conclusion

Linear accelerator, storage ring and buncher technologies offer high-beam quality and short bunches necessary for operation of high efficiency, high-power, high-degree monochromatic prebunched FELs in optical and X-ray regions.

This work was supported partly by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, Grant No 02-02-16209.


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# Ultra-high-precision velocity measurements of oscillations in 𝛼 Cen A

## 1 Introduction

The search for extra-solar planets has driven tremendous improvements in high-precision measurements of stellar differential radial velocities (e.g., Marcy & Butler, 2000). In parallel, the same techniques have been used with great success to measure stellar oscillations. Recent achievements, reviewed by Bouchy & Carrier (2003) and Bedding & Kjeldsen (2003), include observations of oscillations in Procyon with ELODIE (Martic et al., 1999, see also Barban et al., 1999); $`\beta `$ Hyi with UCLES (Bedding et al., 2001) and CORALIE (Carrier et al., 2001); and $`\alpha `$ Cen A and B with CORALIE (Bouchy & Carrier, 2001, 2002; Carrier & Bourban, 2003). Here we report observations of $`\alpha `$ Cen A made with UVES and UCLES which represent the most precise differential radial velocities ever measured on any star apart from the Sun.

## 2 Observations

We observed $`\alpha `$ Cen A in May 2001 from two sites. At the European Southern Observatory in Chile we used UVES (UV-Visual Echelle Spectrograph) at the 8.2-m Unit Telescope 2 of the Very Large Telescope (VLT)111Based on observations collected at the European Southern Observatory, Paranal, Chile (ESO Programme 67.D-0133). At Siding Spring Observatory in Australia we used UCLES (University College London Echelle Spectrograph) at the 3.9-m Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT). In both cases, an iodine cell was used to provide a stable wavelength reference (Butler et al., 1996).

At the VLT we obtained 3013 spectra of $`\alpha `$ Cen A, with typical exposure times of 1–3 s and a median cadence of one exposure every 26 s. At the AAT we obtained 5169 spectra of $`\alpha `$ Cen A, with typical exposure times of 6 s and a median cadence of one exposure every 20 s. The resulting velocities are shown in Fig. 1, and the effects of bad weather can be seen (we were allocated four nights with the VLT and six with the AAT).

The UCLES velocities show upward trends during most nights, which we believe to be related to the slow movement of the CCD dewar as liquid nitrogen boiled off. Nights three and (particularly) five also show a jump that coincides with the refilling of the CCD dewar in the middle of the night. These UCLES observations differed from our earlier run on $`\beta `$ Hyi (Bedding et al., 2001), and also from standard UCLES planet-search observations, in that the CCD was rotated by 90 degrees to speed up readout time. This had the side-effect of causing the CCD readout to be in the same direction as the dispersion, and also of making this direction vertical (so that flexure in the dewar due to changes in its weight would have shifted the spectrum in the dispersion direction). It seems there was an effect on the velocities that was not completely corrected by the iodine reference method, which suggests that either the PSF description or the spectrum extraction from the CCD images was inadequate. We note that improvements to the PSF description are an active area of work to enhance immunity to spectrometer changes. The UVES data, meanwhile, show slow trends and two smaller jumps which are presumably also instrumental – at least one of the jumps can be identified with a correction to the position of the star on the slit. While these jumps and slow trends would seriously compromise a planet search, they fortunately have neglible effect on our measurement of oscillations.

To remove the slow trends, we have subtracted a smoothed version of the data, and this was done separately on either side of the jumps so that they, too, were removed. The detrended time series are shown in Fig. 1. We have verified by calculating power spectra that this process of high-pass filtering effectively removes all power below about 0.2 mHz. It also removes any power at higher frequencies that arises from the jumps, which would otherwise degrade the oscillation spectrum.

## 3 Analysis and discussion

The time series of velocity measurements clearly show oscillations and the effects of beating between modes (Fig. 2). The data presented here have unprecedented precision and we are interested in obtaining the lowest possible noise in the power spectrum so as to measure as many modes as possible. We also wish to estimate the actual precision of the Doppler measurements.

The algorithm used to extract the Doppler velocity from each spectrum also provides us with an estimate $`\sigma _i`$ of the uncertainty in this velocity measurement. These are derived from the scatter of velocities measured from many small ($`1.7`$Å) segments of the echelle spectrum. In the past, we have used these values to generate weights ($`w_i=1/\sigma _i^2`$) for the Fourier analysis (Bedding et al., 2001; Kjeldsen et al., 2003). In the present analysis, we take the opportunity to verify that these $`\sigma _i`$ do indeed reflect the actual noise properties of the velocity measurements.

Our first step in this process was to measure the noise in the power spectrum at high frequencies, well beyond the stellar signal. It soon became clear that this procedure implied a measurement precision significantly worse than is indicated by the point-to-point scatter in the time series itself. The implication is that some fraction of the velocity measurements are ‘bad,’ contributing a disproportionate amount of power in Fourier space.

Since the oscillation signal is the dominant cause of variations in the velocity series, we need to remove this signal in order to estimate the noise and to locate the bad points. We chose to remove the signal iteratively by finding the strongest peak in the power spectrum and subtracting the corresponding sinusoid from the time series. This procedure was carried out for the strongest peaks in the oscillation spectrum in the frequency range 0–3.5 mHz, until spectral leakage into high frequencies from the remaining power was negligible. We were left with a time series of residual velocities, $`r_i`$, which reflects the noise properties of the measurements.

The next step was to analyse the residuals for evidence of bad points, which we would recognize as those values deviating from zero by more than would be expected from their uncertainties. In other words, we examined the ratio $`r_i/\sigma _i`$, which we expect to be Gaussian distributed, so that outliers correspond to suspect data points. We found that the best way to investigate this was via the cumulative histogram of $`|r_i/\sigma _i|`$, which is shown for both the UVES and UCLES as the points in the upper panels of Fig. 3. The solid curves in these figures show the cumulative histograms for the best-fitting Gaussian distributions. We indeed see a significant excess of outliers for $`|r_i/\sigma _i|`$ beyond about 2, in both data sets. The lower panels show the ratio between the points and the curve, which is the fraction $`f`$ of data points that could be considered as good. This fraction is essentially unity out to $`|r_i/\sigma _i|2`$, and then falls off, indicating that about half the data points with $`|r_i/\sigma _i|>3`$ are bad.

At this point, we could simply make the decision to ignore all data points with $`|r_i/\sigma _i|`$ above a certain value, such as 3.0, on the basis that many of them would be bad points that would increase the noise in the oscillation spectrum. We instead chose a more elegant approach, which gave essentially the same results, in which we used the information in Fig. 3 to adjust the weights: those points with large values of $`|r_i/\sigma _i|`$ were decreased in weight, with every $`w_i`$ multiplied by the factor $`f`$. Given that the weights are calculated as $`w_i=1/\sigma _i^2`$, the adjustment was achieved by dividing each measurement error ($`\sigma _i`$) by the square root of $`f`$.

With these adjustments to the measurement uncertainties, which effectively down-weight the bad data points, we now expect the noise floor at high frequencies in the amplitude spectrum of the residuals ($`r_i`$) to be substantially reduced. We measured the average noise $`\sigma _{\mathrm{amp}}`$ in the range 7.5–15 mHz to be 2.11 cm s-1 for UVES and 4.37 cm s-1 for UCLES. The corresponding values before down-weighting the bad data points were 2.33 cm s-1 for UVES and 4.99 cm s-1 for UCLES. We can therefore see that adjusting the weights has lowered the noise by about 10%.

The final stage in this processing involved checking the calibration of the uncertainties. By this, we mean that the estimates $`\sigma _i`$ should be consistent with the noise level determined from the amplitude spectrum. On the one hand, the mean variance of the data can be calculated as a weighted mean of the $`\sigma _i`$, as follows:

$$\underset{i=1}{\overset{N}{}}\sigma _i^2w_i/\underset{i=1}{\overset{N}{}}w_i,$$
(1)
where the weights are given by $`w_i=1/\sigma _i^2`$ (which means the numerator is simply equal to $`N`$). On the other hand, the variance deduced from the noise level $`\sigma _{\mathrm{amp}}`$ in the amplitude spectrum is (Appendix A.1 of Kjeldsen & Bedding, 1995):

$$\sigma _{\mathrm{amp}}^2N/\pi .$$
(2)
We require these to be equal, which gives the condition

$$\sigma _{\mathrm{amp}}^2\underset{i=1}{\overset{N}{}}\sigma _i^2=\pi .$$
(3)
Using the values of $`\sigma _{\mathrm{amp}}`$ given above, we concluded that Eq. (3) would be satisfied for each data set provided the uncertainties $`\sigma _i`$ were multiplied by 0.78 for UVES and 0.87 for UCLES. It is these calibrated $`\sigma _i`$ that are shown in Figs. 2 and 4, and they represent our best estimate of the high-frequency precision of the data. Also shown in Fig. 4 as solid lines are the residuals $`r_i`$ after smoothing with a running box-car mean. We can see that there is generally very good agreement between these two independent measures of the velocity precision, giving us confidence that we have correctly estimated $`\sigma _i`$ both in relative terms and in the absolute calibration.

We have also investigated the dependence of the velocity precision on the photon flux in the stellar spectrum. Figure 5 shows $`\sigma _i`$ versus the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), where the latter is the square root of the median number of photons per pixel in the iodine region of the spectrum. The points for both UVES and UCLES agree well with a slope of $`1`$ in the logarithm, as expected for Poisson statistics. We also note that the offset between the two sets of points arises because of the difference in dispersion of the spectrographs. UVES has higher dispersion, by a factor of 1.55, which means that not only is velocity precision expected to be better by this factor, but also that the SNR per unit wavelength is lower (by the square root of this factor). Combining these effects, we would expect the two distributions to be in the ratio $`1.55^{1.5}=1.93`$, which is exactly what we find in Fig. 5. In other words, the lower precision in the UVES data at a given SNR per pixel results from the higher dispersion but, allowing for this, the intrinsic precision is the same for the two systems. In addition, the CCD on the UVES system was able to record more photons per exposure than UCLES (the median SNR is considerably higher).

The result of the processing described above was a time series for both UVES and UCLES, each of which consisted of the time stamps, the measured velocities (after correction for jumps and drifts) and the uncertainty estimates (after the adjustments described). These two time series could then be merged in order to produce the oscillation power spectrum, and this is shown in Fig. 6. The average noise in the amplitude spectrum in the range 7.5–15 mHz is 2.03 cm s-1. As discussed at the beginning of this section, some of this power comes from spectral leakage of the oscillation signal itself. Therefore, a more accurate measure of the noise is obtained from the power spectrum of the residuals, $`r_i`$, when using the final weights, $`1/\sigma _i^2`$. The result gives an average noise in the range 7.5–15 mHz of 1.91 cm s-1. For comparison, the noise level reported from CORALIE observations of $`\alpha `$ Cen A was 4.3 cm s-1 (Bouchy & Carrier, 2002), while observations of $`\alpha `$ Cen B gave 3.75 cm s-1 (Carrier & Bourban, 2003).

We can also calculate the precision per minute of observing time, which is shown in Table 1. For comparison, we include velocity precision from other oscillation measurements. The list is not meant to be exhaustive, but most of the instruments that have been used in recent years are represented. The precision depends, of course, on several factors such as the telescope aperture, target brightness, observing duty cycle, spectrograph stability and method of wavelength calibration. It is clear that the observations reported here, particularly those with UVES, are significantly more precise than any previous measurements of stars other than the Sun. Of course, we refer here to the precision at frequencies above $`0.8`$ mHz, which is the regime of interest for oscillations in solar-type stars.

The referee has questioned whether adjusting the weights using the method described above might have affected the accuracy with which the oscillation frequencies can be measured. To test this, we have extracted the ten highest peaks from both the power spectrum in Fig. 6 and from the power spectrum obtained without adjusting the weights. The frequencies of all ten peaks agreed very well, with a mean difference of 0.11 $`\mu `$Hz and a maximum difference of 0.4 $`\mu `$Hz. The latter is a factor of ten smaller than the FWHM of the spectral window and probably well below the natural linewidth of the modes. Therefore, there is no reason to think that the reduction in the noise level obtained by adjusting weights has come at the expense of reduced accuracy in the measured frequencies.

## 4 Conclusion

We have analysed differential radial velocity measurements of $`\alpha `$ Cen A made with UVES at the VLT and UCLES at the AAT. Stellar oscillations are clearly visible in the time series. Slow drifts and sudden jumps of a few metres per second, presumably instrumental, were removed from each time series using a high-pass filter. We then used the measurement uncertainties as weights in calculating the power spectrum, but we found it necessary to modify some of the weights to account for a small fraction of bad data points. In the end, we reached a noise floor of 1.9 cm s-1 in the amplitude spectrum and in a future paper we will present a full analysis of the oscillation frequencies and a comparison with stellar models.

We thank Bill Chaplin for providing a times series that allowed us to estimate the precision of BiSON observations. This work was supported financially by the Australian Research Council, by the Danish Natural Science Research Council and by the Danish National Research Foundation through its establishment of the Theoretical Astrophysics Center. We further acknowledge support by NSF grant AST-9988087 (RPB), and by SUN Microsystems.


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# Ion beam sputtering method for progressive reduction of nanostructures dimensions

## I Introduction

There is a variety of different techniques available for fabrication of nano- or micron-sized structures. Ultraviolet (UV) lithography is widely used in microelectronic industry to fabricate large-scale integrated circuits with vast amount of functional elements at once. However, the minimum lateral dimensions attainable with this technique is about 250 nm. By using deep UV light the limit might be pushed close to 100 nm in the futurexia . More advanced methods based on electron beam lithography (EBL) are capable to provide even smaller dimensions and have been applied, e.g., for fabrication of 5-7 nm wide etched lines on a silicon substrateChenAhmed . However, when evaporating metallic structures through masks made with EBL the limit is higher, around 20-50 nm, depending on the molecule size of the resist material and the performance of the particular equipment. The disadvantage of EBL is that it is rather slow. X-rays lithography can in principle be used for patterning, but this method requires significantly more efforts and complicated masksxia . It is also possible to use the sharp tip of an atomic force microscope (AFM) to transfer single particles on a substrate to form a nanopattern lindeli . Alternatively, one can oxidize patterns on the hydrogen-passivated surface with the tip or scratch the pattern on a thin resist layer (see Ref. Anssi,  and references therein for detailed description of the AFM based methods). The difficulty in using AFM in patterning is in removal of the mask material (lift-off) after metal evaporation. As a result, at present moment AFM based nanofabrication has rather limited range of applications.

We studied a different kind of approach where the dimensions of the prefabricated nanosized structures are reduced by ion beam sputtering in controllable and reproducible way. We used aluminum nanowires and single electron transistors (SET) to test applicability of the sputtering method. SET is one of the fundamental components in nanoelectronics and ultrasmall tunnel junctions in general have a lot of potential applications in the futurepashkin . The change in the dimensions of the tunnel junctions was detected by electrical measurements of the charging energy $`E_\mathrm{C}`$ at liquid helium temperature 4.2 K. In case of a nanowire, the decrease of the diameter was determined from the width of superconducting transition $`R(T)`$.

Generally speaking, it is common to study particular properties of the system of interest as a function of some characteristic dimension. Traditionally, many samples of different sizes are fabricated for this purpose. By using the sputtering method, the electrical measurements can be performed on the same sample, which dimensions are progressively reduced between the measurements. This way the inner structure of the system stays the same and thus there are less possibilities of having statistical errors due to circumstantial factors in fabrication.

## II Experimental

### II.1 Sample fabrication

All samples were fabricated on oxidized silicon substrates. Conventional EBL technique was used in patterning followed by metallization in an UHV (Ultra High Vacuum) chamber. Double layer PMMA/MAA resist was used to form an appropriate undercut structure for the angle evaporation. Nanowires were formed by evaporating 45 nm of aluminum on top of the substrate through the PMMA mask. Widths of the fabricated nanowires were approximately 50-80 nm. Figure 1 shows an AFM image of a typical sample.

SETs were fabricated with a standard shadow evaporation technique. First 45 nm thick layer of aluminum was evaporated. Aluminum oxide barrier was grown in situ by natural oxidation in pure oxygen atmosphere ($``$20 mbar) in the loading chamber of the UHV system. After oxidation another 45 nm layer of aluminum was deposited from another angle on top of the previously grown oxide layer to form tunnel junctions. Fig. 2 b) shows an AFM image of a typical SET with two Al-AlOx-Al junctions. About 1 nm thick aluminum oxide layer between the aluminum electrodes forms a tunnel junction, which is thin enough to provide quantum mechanical tunneling of electrons through itSET .

### II.2 Description of the etching method

The samples were three-dimensionally dry etched by ion beam sputtering in a set-up consisting of a high vacuum (p$`10^5`$ mbar) experimental chamber equipped with a sample manipulator and TECTRA Electron Cyclotron Resonance (ECR) plasma ion source capable of delivering high current, wide and homogeneous ion beams. Before sputtering, the samples were cleaned with acetone in an ultrasonic bath and subsequently rinsed in isopropanol. Prior to sputtering the surface of the structures was always checked by profiler Tencor P15 that is capable to provide a vertical step height repeatability of $``$6-7 Å. For dry etching, the samples were bombarded by 1 keV Ar+ ions to a certain fluence using an ion beam current density of about 0.014 mA/cm2. In order to ensure uniform etching over the whole sputtered area, the ions incidence was 60 off the surface normal, and the samples were rotated while sputtering. To avoid overheating of the samples exposed to high current ion beam, the sample holder made of copper was cooled with water and the temperature while sputtering was estimated to be close to room temperature. Each sample contained co-evaporated strips, which were partly protected from the ion beam exposure by a droplet of a varnish. After etching the varnish was removed enabling the profilometer control of the surface step between the etched and the non-etched area. Sputtering rates for various materials are listed in the Table 1.

Ar+ ions of energy 1 keV impinging on the surface at the angle of 60 degrees with respect to the surface normal practically do not penetrate into the subsurface layers. Penetration depth of the Ar+ ions into Al matrix calculated by SRIM (Stopping and Ranges of Ions Matter) programSRIM  for the selected irradiation conditions is less than 15 Å. Taking into account the high rate of the surface sputtering due to high density of the ion current and the glancing incidence, the ion beam etching can be considered as ’a gentle cut’ of the up-most surface atoms without appreciable influence on the underlying layers. The surface of the samples was controlled before and after the ion bombardment with AFM, SEM and profilometer. The influence of the sputtering has a polishing effect, causing no noticeable destruction to the nanostructures.

### II.3 Electrical measurements

The superconducting transition of the wires was measured before and after the sputtering sessions. The resistance of the wires as a function of temperature was measured with the four-probe method. The samples were inserted into a directly pumped 4He bath, where the temperature can be tuned with the accuracy of $`\pm `$0.1 mK.

In case of SETs the differential conductance vs. bias voltage characteristics was measured at low voltages ($`\pm `$ 10 mV per junction) at liquid helium temperature 4.2 K. The conductance measurements were performed with Nanoway CBT Monitor 400R, an instrument based on an AC resistance bridgenanoway .

## III Results and discussion

### III.1 Sputtered aluminum nanowires

Fig. 3 shows a typical effect of sputtering on the shape of superconducting transition of a wire. It is clearly seen, that the transition becomes wider and the critical temperature $`T_\mathrm{C}`$tc1 ; tc2  and the normal state resistance $`R_\mathrm{N}`$ changes. All these observations indicate that the wire cross-section has decreased.

The dimensionality of a superconductor is determined by the temperature-dependent coherence length $`\xi (T)`$. For the ’dirty limit’ superconductors (mean free path $`l`$ is smaller than $`\xi `$) the effective coherence length $`\xi (T)=0.85(l\xi _{\mathrm{BCS}}(T))^{1/2}`$Tinkham , where the zero-temperature BCS coherence length for aluminum is $`\xi _{\mathrm{BCS}}(0)1.6\mu `$m. Thus, formally, any size superconductor sufficiently close to the critical temperature $`T_\mathrm{C}`$ can be considered as ’low-dimensional’. However, if to restrict ourselves to temperatures apart from the fluctuation range and the reasonably ’dirty’ samples ($`l`$ 10-30 nm), one can consider an aluminum wire with the effective diameter $`\sqrt{\sigma }<`$ 100 nm ($`\sigma `$ being the wire cross-section) as one-dimensional (1-D).

The shape of the bottom part of a superconducting transition $`R(T)`$ of not too narrowZaikin ; Golubev  1-D wires is described by the model of temperature activated phase slipsLAMH ; Lukens . The effective resistance exponentially depends on the ratio of the condensation energy of a minimum size superconducting domain of size $`\sigma \xi `$ and the thermal energy $`k_\mathrm{B}T`$LAMH :

$$R_{\mathrm{eff}}(T)R_\mathrm{N}\frac{L}{\xi }\mathrm{exp}\left(\frac{B_C^2\mathrm{\Omega }}{k_\mathrm{B}T}\right),$$
(1)
where $`R_\mathrm{N}`$ is the normal state resistance, $`L`$ is the length of the wire, $`B_\mathrm{C}(T)`$ is the critical magnetic field, and $`\mathrm{\Omega }=K\xi \sigma `$ is the volume of the so-called phase-slip center (minimum size of a superconductor to be driven normal). Coefficient $`K`$ should be of the order of one: $`K1`$, relating the geometrical size to the effective one. The complete expression for the effective resistance used for $`R(T)`$ data fitting includes other termsLAMH , being dependent, for example, on the ratio between the measuring current and the critical current. However, the used measuring currents ($``$ 10 nA) were much smaller than the critical value. Hence, these terms do not contribute quantitatively and are skipped in (1) for simplicity.

The cross-sections $`\sigma `$ obtained from the measurements of the normal state resistance correlate well with the ones used in the fitting procedure (Table 2). The common parameters used for the fits are the sample length $`L=10\mu `$m, $`\xi _{\mathrm{BCS}}(0)=1.6\mu `$m, $`K=0.7`$, and the product of resistivity and mean free path $`\rho l=4.310^{16}`$ $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$m2. The critical temperatures $`T_\mathrm{C}`$ used in fitting procedure (Table 2) correspond well to the experimentally observed onsets of superconductivity (Fig. 3). The increase of the critical temperature with the reduction of the aluminum wire cross-section (and, in general, the thickness of a film) is a well-known effect. Commonly accepted explanation for this phenomenon is not yet settled, while various models are currently discussedtc1 ; tc2 . So far, no traces of the quantum phase slip phenomenaZaikin ; Golubev ; Giordano ; Bezryadin  have been detected. At least, down to the aluminum wire effective diameter $`\sqrt{\sigma }`$30 nm.

The fitting of the experimental data with model calculationsLAMH  clearly indicates the reduction of the wire cross-section (Table 2) while subsequent sputtering sessions. The absence of artefacts on the experimental $`R(T)`$ dependencies (Fig. 3) proves that the dry ion etching does not cause ’serious’ damage to the sample (voids or constrictions), but removes the material from the surface gently and in a controllable way. Qualitatively similar results were obtained on few tens of samples.

### III.2 Sputtered single electron transistors

A single electron transistor consists of an island isolated from the environment via two tunnel junctions, and a gate electrode which is not important for this study. The characteristic parameter of a single electron transistor is the charging energy, which is the energy required to add one extra electron into the island of an SET,

$$E_\mathrm{C}=\frac{e^2}{2C_\mathrm{\Sigma }},$$
(2)
where $`C_\mathrm{\Sigma }=C_1+C_2+C_0`$ is the sum of the capacitances of the junctions and the capacitance of the central island to the ground. Usually it is assumed that the ground capacitance $`C_0`$ is negligible and the capacitances of the junctions are equal, $`C_1=C_2C`$. The charging energy is of particular interest in this study because it is inversely proportional to the area of the junctions. This can be seen by substituting the expression for the plate capacitor $`C=\epsilon \epsilon _0A/d`$ to Eq. (2), where $`A`$ is the junction area, $`d`$ is the thickness and $`\epsilon `$ the dielectric constant of an insulating barrier. Thus the charging energy depends on the size of the junctions.

The conductance of a SET as a function of the bias voltage at low temperatures shows a dipCBT . In this study the parameter of interest is the relative height of the $`\mathrm{\Delta }G/G`$ dip (Fig. 4), which is proportional to the charging energyCBT :

$$\mathrm{\Delta }G/G_\mathrm{T}=\frac{E_\mathrm{C}}{6k_\mathrm{B}T}.$$
(3)
By measuring the charging energy at liquid helium temperature 4.2 K before and after ion beam etching, one can determine how the areas of junctions have changed by sputtering. Here a natural assumption has been made that the thickness of the insulating layer and its dielectric constant $`\epsilon `$ are not altered while etching.

Figure 5 shows the charging energy of different SET samples measured after fabrication and each sputtering session. It is clearly seen that the sputtering increases the charging energy gradually, indicating that the method is capable of reducing the areas of the tunnel junctions. Similar effect has been already observednakamura . As it follows from equation (3), the relative height of the conductance dip is inversely proportional to the junction area. Therefore, one can conclude from the Figure 5, that the junction areas of the sample ”SET5” have reduced by $``$40 % with respect to the original after three sputtering sessions. The tunnel junction resistances also increased while etching, additionally indicating the reduction of the tunnel junction areas. For instance, in sample ”SET5” the original resistance was 37 k$`\mathrm{\Omega }`$, and it became 84 k$`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ after third sputtering. Multisession sputtering was performed on many of the samples without damaging them. Actually the sputtering was not always the cause of the broken SETs; many of those were destroyed while making the electric contacts.

Since the tunnel junctions are formed by thin oxide layers in between aluminum electrodes, there exists a possibility of natural ’aging’ of the samples at normal atmospheric conditions leading to changes of characteristics. Reference measurements were performed to rule out the possibility that charging energy changes ’by itself’ by this natural aging. The charging energy of these samples was measured repeatedly during the time period of several days. No increases in charging energy were observed. So we can be sure that the aging effect is negligible.

In the first sputtering session a surface layer of approximately 25 nm was removed from the electrodes and the island forming the SET. In the following 5-7 nm per session were etched. The behavior of sample ”SET 5” is a bit surprising: although the sputtering conditions and estimated thickness of the removed layers were the same in sessions 2 and 3, the increase of the charging energy is much larger after the third session. It implies that either the sputtering rate changes as the dimensions of the SET structure become smaller, or a certain critical state of the system has been reached.

What could this critical state be? Fig. 6 a) shows a schematic drawing of the SET structure seen from the side just after fabrication.

Due to of the shadow evaporation method the metal parts do overlap and the oxide layer gets its characteristic form having approximately vertical and horizontal parts. While sputtering, one finally reaches a state pictured in Fig. 6 b). The metallic contact between the metal of the island and the metal on top of the electrode is lost and ’suddenly’ the effective junction area is much smaller. We assume, that the abrupt increase after third sputtering session for the structure ”SET5” (Fig. 5) is at least partly due to this threshold effect.

The sputtering rate should not be necessarily the same for macroscopically large and nanosized objects. The calibration of sputtering rate in our experiments was done by measuring the height of the step developed between sputtered and non-sputtered regions on the large aluminum contact pads. Although the profilometer provides high vertical resolution ($``$5-7Å), the lateral dimensions of the finest parts in the nanostructures studied were not resolvable. Therefore, if at certain stage of sputtering the etching rate of the finest parts has dramatically increased, this would result in fast reduction of the areas of tunnel junctions and abrupt increase of the observed charging energy, e.g., after third sputtering session (Fig. 5). The possibility of such a scenario is currently under investigation. At present, knowledge about interaction of ions with low dimensional objects, like nanowires, ultra-small tunnel junctions and nano-islands, is rather scarce. Ion sputtering of nanosized objects has not been well explored yet, and various aspects of this method still have to be studied and developed in order to achieve a level suitable for various applications in nanofabrication.

SEM and AFM imaging of the sputtered samples revealed no strongly developed topography on the surface normally attributed to a high fluence ion irradiation. No trenches, craters or other extended defects on the surface were observed. On the contrary, the surface of the sputtered aluminum structures and their topography became smoother after sputtering when compared to as-fabricated state (Fig. 7). It should be noted that single electron transistors are usually considered as very fragile to stay ’alive’ under experimental manipulations. Nevertheless, in our experiments both aluminum nanowires and SETs showed a very high degree of stability under high current ion irradiation. Even those SET samples which were ’destroyed’ in a sense that the resistance became infinite, SEM and AFM observations revealed no breakages or discontinuity. This peculiarity of SETs is still unexplained: they may show infinite resistance and still look perfect. In our experiments any radiation damage fatal for the performance of the wires and SETs should be smaller than $``$5 nm in size, otherwise they would be detected by our SEM and AFM.

## IV Conclusions

We have demonstrated that the ion beam sputtering can be effectively used for reducing the dimensions of prefabricated metallic nanostructures without degradation of their properties and performance. The applicability of the method has been verified with aluminum nanowires and SETs. In the former case, the diameter of the wires was reduced from the initial 60-70 nm down to $``$30 nm. When the method was applied to SETs, the charging energy was found to increase indicating that the total area of the tunnel junctions decreased. Therefore, it was shown that dimensions of the nanostructures can be reduced by ion sputtering in a controllable and reproducible way.

By virtue of the surface nature of sputtering phenomenon, the method was proved to be very ’gentle’ in a sense that it allows to decrease the dimensions of delicate nanostructures by gradually removing the surface layers without introducing any changes into the interior. Reproducibility and controllability provided by the method imply that ion sputtering is in general applicable to nanoelectronic components and circuits containing nanosized wires and tunnel junctions. The fact that the tunnel junctions ’stay alive’ while sputterings makes the range of applicability of the method wider. For instance the operational temperatures of single electron devices can be extended by increasing the charging energy. It is believed, that bombardment with low energy inert argon gas ions causes no chemical reactions. The method is envisaged to be applicable to circuits based on any kind of metals, semiconductors, insulators and their combinations, regardless of the chemical composition and morphology. Since the method can be applied repeatedly to the same sample, gradual reduction of dimensions is achievable in those applications where the size effect is studied or employed. Instead of fabricating a number of samples of different sizes and comparing their properties and performance, the sputtering method allows to work only with a single sample, thereby, avoiding uncertainties due to the circumstantial factors in fabrication.

###### Acknowledgements.

This work has been supported by the Academy of Finland under the Finnish Centre of Excellence Programme 2000-2005 (Project No. 44875, Nuclear and Condensed Matter Programme at JYFL) and the EU Commission FP-6 NMP-1 ”ULTRA-1D” project No:505457-1 ”Experinmental and theoretical investication of electron transport in ultra-narrow 1-dimensional nanostructures”.


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# Rearrangement of cluster structure during fission processes

## References


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# Thermal leptogenesis in a model with mass varying neutrinos

## I introduction

The baryon number asymmetry of the Universe has been determined to the precision of less than 10% after the first year observations of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) experimentwmap . The reported value of the asymmetry is

$$\eta _B\frac{n_B}{n_\gamma }=6.1_{0.2}^{+0.3}\times 10^{10},$$
(1)
where $`n_B=n_bn_{\overline{b}}`$ and $`n_\gamma `$ are the baryon and photon number densities, respectively.

On the theoretical side, many models have been proposed in the literaturerev  to explain the small while non-zero $`\eta _B`$ dynamically. Among various models, leptogenesis is one of the most attractive scenarioslepto , where lepton number asymmetry is converted to baryon number asymmetry via the $`(B+L)`$-violating sphaleron interactionsspha . This mechanism has been studied extensively in the literatureearly ; vari ; ibarra ; buch ; new ; therm .

In the minimal scenario of leptogenesis, the standard model is extended by including three generations of right-handed (RH) neutrinos, which are Majorana fermions and couple to the lepton doublets through Yukawa couplings. The heavy RH neutrinos are produced in the early universe by thermal scattering with the primordial thermal bath via the Yukawa coupling. In this framework, the cosmological baryon asymmetry is naturally connected to the neutrino properties through the seesaw mechanismseesaw , which is the most natural explanation for the tiny neutrino masses observed in the neutrino oscillation experimentsneu . As shown in Ref. buch , the amount of the baryon asymmetry generated in this minimal thermal leptogenesis scenario can be characterized by four parameters: the maximal CP asymmetry $`ϵ_1`$, the lightest RH neutrino mass $`M_1`$, the effective light neutrino mass $`\stackrel{~}{m}`$ and the quadratic mean of the light neutrino masses $`\overline{m}`$, under the assumption that the dominant contribution to the lepton asymmetry is given by the decay of the lightest RH neutrino, $`N_1`$. The detailed calculations show that to produce the observed baryon asymmetry, it requires $`M_110^{10}GeV`$ and $`\overline{m}0.2eV`$ which corresponds to $`m_i0.12eV`$.

Although it is theoretically elegant and simple, this scenario seems to need a high reheating temperature, $`T_RM_1𝒪(10^{10}GeV)`$, which is only marginally compatible with the bound from the gravitino problem, $`T_R(10^810^{10})GeV`$, in supersymmetric modelsgrav . The degenerate solution of the neutrino masses is also strongly disfavored in this scenario. Note that if the evidence of neutrinoless double $`\beta `$ decay with $`m_{ee}=(0.050.86)eV`$ 0b  (at 95% C.L.) is confirmed, a degenerate neutrino spectrum is required. A recent study on the cosmological data also showed a preference for degenerate neutrinos with $`m_i=0.2eV`$deg . A possible way to accommodate the degenerate neutrinos by the thermal leptogenesis is the resonant enhancement of the CP asymmetry when the heavy RH neutrinos are nearly degenerate, $`|M_{2,3}M_1|=𝒪(\mathrm{\Gamma }_i)`$vari ; new .

In the standard $`\mathrm{\Lambda }`$CDM cosmology, the dark energy which drives the universe accelerating weights about $`73\%`$ of the total energy of the universewmap ; sup ; sdss . However, the nature of the dark energy (DE) remains mysterious. It could be simply a remnant small cosmological constant. However, many physicists are attracted by the dynamical solution with a scalar field (or multi-scalar fields) like Quintessence. Being a dynamical component, the scalar field dark energy is expected to interact with the ordinary matter. In the literature there have been a lot of studies on the possible couplings of Quintessence to baryon, dark matter and photonsint . Recent data on the possible variation of the electromagnetic fine structure constant reported inwebb  has triggered interests in studies related to the interactions between Quintessence and the matter fields.

Recently we have studied various possible interactions, with or without supersymmetry, between Quintessence and the matter field of the electroweak standard modelli3 . In a previous paperwangxl  we considered a possibility of neutrinos coupling with Quintessence and studied its implications on cosmology. In this paper we propose a scenario that the right-handed neutrinos in the minimal seesaw model couple to Quintessence and examine its implications on the thermal leptogenesis. Other possible implications of varying neutrino masses in astrophysics and cosmology are discussed in Ref. nelson . With a detailed numerical calculation we will show that in this scenario the reheating temperature can be as low as about $`10^8GeV`$ and the degenerate neutrino mass patten with $`m_i𝒪(0.2eV)`$ will be allowed.

This paper is organized as follows. In Sec II, we will present the framework and formulation for the calculation of leptogenesis in our model. We will explain how the interaction between the right-handed neutrinos and Quintessence affect $`\eta _B`$ in terms of the four parameters $`ϵ_1`$, $`M_1`$, $`\stackrel{~}{m}`$ and $`\overline{m}`$. In section III, we will present the numerical results. In section IV, we consider a Quintessence model and propose a specific example of Quintessence to RH neutrinos, then study the interplay between the leptogenesis and the evolution of Quintessence. Sec. V is the summary and conclusion of this paper.

## II Interacting dark energy scalar field with neutrinos

### II.1 The model

We extend the minimal seesaw model by introducing a new coupling between Quintessence scalar field, $`Q`$, and the RH neutrinos. The Lagrangian relevant to leptogenesis is given by

$$=_{lep}+_Q,$$
(2)
with

$$_{lep}=Y_{ij}\overline{L}_i\stackrel{~}{H}N_j+\frac{1}{2}M_i(Q)N_i^TCN_i+h.c.,$$
(3)
and

$$_Q=\frac{1}{2}_\mu Q^\mu QV(Q),$$
(4)
where $`Y_{ij}`$ is the Yukawa coupling of the RH neutrinos, $`M_i(Q)`$ is the Majorana masses of the RH neutrinos which is now a function of the value of $`Q`$, and $`V(Q)`$ is the potential of the Quintessence. We have taken the basis that the RH Majorana mass matrix is diagonal. The form of $`V(Q)`$ for a specific model and an explicit form of $`M(Q)`$ will be given in Sec. IV. The Quintessence dependent masses of the right-handed neutrinos give rise to different Majorana masses at the early epoch from that at the present epoch, which is the key for the difference of our model from the usual leptogenesis scenario.

### II.2 The CP asymmetry

Generally, the Yukawa coupling $`Y`$ contains CP violating phases and lead to different branching ratios for $`N`$ decays into lepton and antilepton. The asymmetry for $`N_1`$ decays isearly ; vari

$`ϵ_1`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{\mathrm{\Gamma }(N_1LH)\mathrm{\Gamma }(N_1\overline{L}\overline{H})}{\mathrm{\Gamma }(N_1LH)+\mathrm{\Gamma }(N_1\overline{L}\overline{H})}}`$ (5)
$``$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{3}{16\pi }}{\displaystyle \frac{1}{(Y^{}Y)_{11}}}{\displaystyle \underset{i=2,3}{}}\text{Im}\left[(Y^{}Y)_{1i}\right]^2{\displaystyle \frac{M_1}{M_i}},\text{for}M_1M_2,M_3.`$
Since the light neutrino masses are generated by the seesaw mechanismseesaw  and constrained by the neutrino oscillation experiments, the CP asymmetry is also constrained by the neutrino data. In the case of hierarchical neutrinos, i.e., $`m_3\sqrt{\mathrm{\Delta }m_{atm}^2}0.05eV\sqrt{\mathrm{\Delta }m_{sol}^2}0.008eVm_1`$, an approximate upper bound on the CP asymmetryibarra  is

$$|ϵ_1|\frac{3}{16\pi }\frac{M_1\sqrt{\mathrm{\Delta }m_{atm}^2}}{v^2},$$
(6)
with $`v=174GeV`$ being the vacuum expectation value of the neutral Higgs boson. For the degenerate case, i.e., $`m_1m_2m_3\overline{m}/\sqrt{3}\sqrt{\mathrm{\Delta }m_{atm}^2}`$, the upper bound is given by

$$|ϵ_1|\frac{3\sqrt{3}}{16\pi }\frac{M_1\mathrm{\Delta }m_{atm}^2}{v^2\overline{m}},$$
(7)
where $`\overline{m}=\sqrt{m_1^2+m_2^2+m_3^2}`$ is the quadratic mean of the neutrino masses. One can see that the maximal $`ϵ_1`$ is proportional to $`M_1`$ while inversely proportional to $`\overline{m}`$. In the following we always take the upper bound of $`ϵ_1`$ to study the maximal value of $`\eta _B`$ on the parameter space.

The final lepton asymmetry is determined in general by

$$Y_L\frac{n_Ln_{\overline{L}}}{s}=\kappa \frac{ϵ_1}{g_{}},$$
(8)
where $`s`$ is the entropy density, $`g_{}`$ represents the number of the relativistic degrees of freedom at the time when $`N_1`$ decays and $`\kappa <1`$ represents the washout effects for the lepton number asymmetry in the thermal bath. The lepton asymmetry in Eq. (8) will be converted partly into baryon asymmetry by the electroweak sphaleron process taking into account the gauge, Yukawa interaction and the QCD sphaleron effectsqcdspha , $`Y_B=aY_{BL}aY_L`$, with $`a=28/79`$therm ; chem .

### II.3 The washout effect

The factor $`\kappa `$ in Eq. (8) can be calculated by solving the Boltzmann equationsbuch ; therm . At the leading order of $`ϵ_1`$ one has the Boltzmann equations for $`Y_{N_1}=n_{N_1}/s`$ and $`Y_{BL}=n_{BL}/s`$,

$`{\displaystyle \frac{sH}{z}}{\displaystyle \frac{dY_{N_1}}{dz}}`$ $`=`$ $`\left({\displaystyle \frac{Y_{N_1}}{Y_{N_1}^{eq}}}1\right)\left(\gamma _D+2\gamma _{H,s}+4\gamma _{H,t}\right),`$ (9)
$`{\displaystyle \frac{sH}{z}}{\displaystyle \frac{dY_{BL}}{dz}}`$ $`=`$ $`ϵ_1\gamma _D\left({\displaystyle \frac{Y_{N_1}}{Y_{N_1}^{eq}}}1\right){\displaystyle \frac{Y_{BL}}{Y_L^{eq}}}\gamma _W,`$ (10)
with

$$\gamma _W=\frac{1}{2}\gamma _D+2\gamma _N+2\gamma _{N,t}+2\gamma _{H,t}+\frac{Y_{N_1}}{Y_{N_1}^{eq}}\gamma _{H,s},$$
(11)
where $`\gamma `$ is the space time density of the scatterings in thermal equilibrium. In the equations above, $`\gamma _D`$ refers to the reaction density for the process of $`N_1`$ decays (and inverse decays), $`N_1LH(\overline{L}\overline{H})`$, $`\gamma _{H,s}`$ and $`\gamma _{H,t}`$ for the processes of $`\mathrm{\Delta }L=1`$ scatterings via exchanging Higgs boson, $`N_1L(\overline{L})\overline{t}(t)Q(\overline{Q})`$ in $`s`$ channel and $`N_1t(\overline{t})\overline{L}(L)Q(\overline{Q})`$ in $`t`$ channel, $`\gamma _N`$ and $`\gamma _{N,t}`$ for the processes of $`\mathrm{\Delta }L=2`$ scatterings via exchanging the RH neutrinos, $`LH\overline{L}\overline{H}`$ in both $`s`$ and $`t`$ channels and $`LL\overline{H}\overline{H}`$, $`\overline{L}\overline{L}HH`$ in $`t`$ channel.

In Eq. (9), the minus sign on the right-hand side means that all the reactions drive the $`Y_{N_1}`$ to its equilibrium value $`Y_{N_1}^{eq}`$. In Eq. (10), the first term on the right-hand side is the source term, which gives rise to non-zero $`Y_{BL}`$, while the second term represents washout effects that lead $`Y_{BL}`$ to zero.

The $`\gamma _N`$ consists two parts, the resonant part, $`\gamma _{N,res}`$ and the non-resonant part, $`\gamma _{N,non}`$, i.e., $`\gamma _N=\gamma _{N,res}+\gamma _{N,non}`$. The $`\gamma _D`$, $`\gamma _{H,s}`$, $`\gamma _{H,t}`$ and $`\gamma _{N,res}`$ are all proportional to the effective neutrino massbuch

$$\stackrel{~}{m}=\frac{(Y^{}Y)_{11}v^2}{M_1},$$
(12)
while $`\gamma _{N,non}`$ and $`\gamma _{N,t}`$ are proportional to $`M_1\overline{m}^2`$. These properties are essential in understanding the behavior of the solutions of the Boltzmann equations. When $`\delta \gamma _W=\gamma _{N,non}+\gamma _{N,t}M_1\overline{m}^2`$ is negligible, i.e., at $`M_1(\overline{m}/0.1eV)^2<10^{13}GeV`$buch , the washout factor $`\kappa `$ is mainly determined by $`\stackrel{~}{m}`$ and nearly independent of $`M_1`$ and $`\overline{m}`$. The effect of $`\stackrel{~}{m}`$ has two different aspects. When it is very small ($`10^3eV`$), the RH neutrinos will not be able to reach thermal equilibrium via the scattering with the thermal bath, so $`\kappa `$ will be small. Conversely, if $`\stackrel{~}{m}`$ is too large the RH neutrinos can be brought into thermal equilibrium rapidly. However, the washout effect will also be large, consequently we have a small $`\kappa `$. Around $`\stackrel{~}{m}10^3eV`$, $`\kappa `$ reaches its maximal value. When $`\delta \gamma _W`$ is sizable $`\kappa `$ will be suppressed exponentially, since the washout effect is given by

$$\kappa (z)=_{z_{in}}^z𝑑z^{}\gamma _D(z^{})\mathrm{\Delta }(z^{})e^{_z^{}^z𝑑z^{\prime \prime }z^{\prime \prime }\gamma _W(z^{\prime \prime })/(sHY_L^{eq})},$$
(13)
with $`\mathrm{\Delta }(z)=(Y_{N_1}/Y_{N_1}^{eq}1)z/(sH)`$. In this case, $`\kappa `$ becomes nearly independent of $`\stackrel{~}{m}`$.

In short, $`ϵ_1`$ (as well as $`Y_L`$) increases with $`M_1`$ while decreases with $`\overline{m}`$ linearly when $`\delta \gamma _W`$ is negligible, $`M_1(\overline{m}/0.1eV)^2<10^{13}GeV`$buch . However, when $`\delta \gamma _WM_1\overline{m}^2`$ is sizable, $`M_1(\overline{m}/0.1eV)^2>10^{13}GeV`$, the final asymmetry $`Y_L`$ will be suppressed exponentiallybuch . The $`\kappa `$ reaches maximal at $`\stackrel{~}{m}10^3eV`$ when the effect of $`\delta \gamma _W`$ is negligible. It is shown in Ref. buch  that to generate the required value of the baryon number asymmetry, $`\eta _B`$, one needs $`M_110^{10}GeV`$ and $`\overline{m}0.2eV`$ in general.

### II.4 The effect of Quintessence

With the interaction between the Quintessence and the RH neutrinos, $`M_1(Q)`$ is now a function of the Quintessence field. $`M_1`$ at the epoch when it decays will differ from that at the present epoch. We introduce a parameter $`K`$

$$K(Q^D)=\frac{M_1^0}{M_1^D},$$
(14)
where $`M_1^0=M_1(Q^0)`$ and $`M_1^D=M_1(Q^D)`$ denote the Majorana masses of the RH neutrinos at present and at the decay time. For simplicity we take $`K`$, as well as $`M_1`$, as a constant when solving the Boltzmann equations. In section IV, we will show that $`Q`$ is quite flat during the period of leptogenesis for the model we consider and this is a reasonable assumption. We then have

$$m_\nu ^D=Y\frac{1}{M^D}Y^Tv^2=m_\nu ^0K,\overline{m}^D=\overline{m}^0K,\stackrel{~}{m}^D=\stackrel{~}{m}^0K,$$
(15)
where the masses with the superscripts “D” and “0” correspond to the values evaluated at the leptogenesis and at the present time respectively.

## III numerical results

In this section we present our numerical results by solving the Boltzmann equations. Besides $`M_1`$, $`\overline{m}`$ and $`\stackrel{~}{m}`$ we now introduce a new parameter $`K`$. We will show that varying $`K`$ makes it possible for $`M_1`$ to be as low as about $`10^8GeV`$ and $`\overline{m}`$ can be as large as $`0.4eV`$ which corresponds to $`m_i0.23eV`$wmap 111 This is the upper bound set by WMAP. Recent SDSSsdss  lowers this limit to $`0.2eV`$. When neutrino masses vary during the evolution of the Universe, however, these cosmological bounds on the absolute neutrino masses may be different which is worthwhile studying further..

In Fig. 1, we plot the baryon number asymmetry $`\eta _B`$ as a function of $`K`$ for the hierarchical neutrino mass spectrum, i.e., $`\overline{m}^0=0.05eV`$. On the left panel, we take $`M_1^D=10^8GeV`$ for $`\stackrel{~}{m}^0=10^4,10^5,10^6eV`$ respectively. One can see from the figure that $`\eta _B`$ increases with $`K`$ linearly until $`\stackrel{~}{m}^D10^3eV`$, i.e., $`\eta _B`$ increases with $`K`$ until $`K10^1,10^2,10^3`$ for $`\stackrel{~}{m}^0=10^4,10^5,10^6eV`$ respectively. In these regions, the amount of enhancement of $`ϵ_1`$ as $`K`$ gets large dominates over that of the washout effect so that $`\eta _B`$ increases linearly with $`K`$. However, as the $`\overline{m}^D`$ is about $`\overline{m}^0K0.0510^3eV`$, $`\delta \gamma _W`$ becomes sizable then $`\eta _B`$ decreases exponentially as $`K`$. In the region between these two points, $`\eta _B`$ is a flat function of $`K`$. This is due to the effect of $`K`$ which enhances $`ϵ_1`$ on one hand while decrease $`\kappa `$ as $`\stackrel{~}{m}^D10^3eV`$ on the other hand. On the right panel, we fix $`\stackrel{~}{m}^D=6\times 10^4eV`$, which gives the maximal $`\kappa `$ for the negligible $`\delta \gamma _W`$buch , and take $`M_1^D=10^8,10^9,10^{10}GeV`$ respectively. One can see from this figure that $`\eta _B`$ increases with $`K`$ linearly until $`M_1^D(\overline{m}^D/0.1eV)^210^{13}GeV`$. The different behavior between the two figures is easy to understand if one notices that $`\stackrel{~}{m}^D`$ is fixed and does not increase with $`K`$ on the right panel.

In Fig. 2, we plot the contour for $`\eta _B=5.5\times 10^{10}`$ in the $`M_1^DK`$ plane for the hierarchical neutrinos. One can see from this figure that as K gets large, $`M_1^D`$ is allowed to take a smaller value. For example, at $`K30`$, $`M_1^D`$ can be as low as about $`10^8GeV`$. As a result of it, the reheating temperature required will be lowered than that in the minimal thermal leptogenesis.

In Fig. 3, we plot $`\eta _B`$ as a function of $`K`$ for the degenerate neutrinos, taking $`\overline{m}^0=0.4eV`$ ($`m_i0.23eV`$) for an example. It should be noticed that $`\stackrel{~}{m}`$ is constrained as $`m_1<\stackrel{~}{m}<m_3`$ if no fine tunning is takenbuch . We take $`\stackrel{~}{m}^0m_i^00.23eV`$ in this case. The figure looks similar to that for the hierarchical case. For $`\stackrel{~}{m}^D=(0.23K)eV10^3eV`$, $`\eta _B`$ increases linearly with $`K`$. At the point $`M_1^D(\overline{m}^D/0.1eV)^210^{13}GeV`$, $`\eta _B`$ starts to decrease exponentially as $`K`$. In the region between, $`\eta _B`$ is almost a flat function of $`K`$. We notice that for $`K=1`$, which corresponds to the case of vanishing Quintessence coupling, no parameter space will satisfy the observed $`\eta _B`$. However, for $`M_1^D=10^{13}GeV`$, $`\eta _B`$ can meet the requirement for $`K0.5`$, which is not far from $`K=1`$. One can see that non-zero $`K`$ makes it possible to generate $`\eta _B`$ required for the degenerate neutrino mass spectrum. However, in this case we have to take $`K`$ to be smaller than $`1`$ so that $`\kappa `$ is not suppressed exponentially. This leads to a small $`ϵ_1`$ too, which forces us to take a bigger $`M_1^D`$. Therefore, it will not be possible to lower $`M_1^D`$ and increase $`\overline{m}^0`$ simultaneously.

In Fig. 4 we plot the contour of $`\eta _B=5.5\times 10^{10}`$ in the $`M_1^DK`$ plane for the degenerate neutrinos. One can see that $`M_1^D`$ decreases linearly firstly, then starts to increases slowly. At $`K0.007`$, $`M_1^D`$ reaches its minimal value, $`M_1^D4.5\times 10^{12}`$GeV.

## IV Quintessence models

In the last section we present our numerical results of leptogenesis taking $`K`$ as a free parameter. In this section we will consider a specific Quintessence model and propose a specific form of its coupling to the RH neutrinos. We will study numerically the evolution of $`Q`$ taking into account the back reaction of the neutrino background and calculate the factor $`K`$.

In the literature, there have been various proposals for the explicit form of couplings in studying the interaction between the Quintessence and the matter field. For example, one usually introduces $`QF_{\mu \nu }F^{\mu \nu }`$ ($`F_{\mu \nu }`$ is the electromagnetic field strength tensor) to study the variation of the electromagnetic fine structure constant. However, in an attempt to understand the puzzle why the density of dark matter and dark energy are nearly equal today, the authors of Ref. dmint  recently consider a model of interacting Quintessence with dark matter and in their scenario the mass of dark matter particle depends exponentially on the value of $`Q`$, $`m(Q)=\overline{m}e^{\lambda Q/M_{pl}}`$.

In this paper, we assume that the coupling between Quintessence and the RH neutrinos takes a simple form as

$$M_i(Q)=\overline{M}_ie^{\beta \frac{Q}{M_{pl}}},$$
(16)
where $`\beta `$ is a $`𝒪(1)`$ coefficient. The ratio $`K`$ is then given as

$$K\frac{M_i^0}{M_i^D}=e^{\beta \frac{Q^0Q^D}{M_{pl}}}.$$
(17)
For a numerical calculation of $`K`$, we consider a Quintessence model with the double exponential potentialBarreiro

$$V=V_0(e^{\lambda Q}+e^{\alpha Q}).$$
(18)
This model has the tracking property for suitable parameters. In the absence of coupling in Eq. (16), the evolution of Quintessence is described by the equations

$`H^2={\displaystyle \frac{8\pi G}{3}}(\rho _m+\rho _\gamma +\rho _Q),`$ (19)
$`\ddot{Q}+3H\dot{Q}+{\displaystyle \frac{dV(Q)}{dQ}}=0,`$ (20)
where $`H`$ is the Hubble constant, $`\rho _m`$, $`\rho _\gamma `$ and $`\rho _Q`$ represent the energy densities of matter, radiation and Quintessence respectively. We choose the model parameters as $`\lambda =100M_{pl}^1`$, $`\alpha =100M_{pl}^1`$, the initial value of Quintessence field $`Q_i=1.374M_{pl}`$ and for the state of equation, which is defined as

$$W_Q=\frac{p_Q}{\rho _Q}=\frac{\dot{Q}^2/2V(Q)}{\dot{Q}^2/2+V(Q)},$$
(21)
the initial value is $`W_{Q_i}=1`$. We obtain that $`\mathrm{\Omega }_{Q_0}0.72`$ and the present equation of state of Quintessence is $`W_{Q_0}1`$ which are consistent with the observational data. In Fig. 5 we show the evolution of $`W_Q`$ and $`Q`$ with the temperature $`T`$. One can see that Quintessence begins to track the background at $`T10^4GeV`$.

Taking into account the interaction with the RH neutrinos, we get the equation of evolution of Quintessence as

$$\ddot{Q}+3H\dot{Q}+\frac{dV(Q)}{dQ}+\frac{dV_I(Q)}{dQ}=0.$$
(22)
The source term in the equation above is given bypeebles

$$\frac{dV_I(Q)}{dQ}=\underset{i}{}n_i\frac{dM_i}{dQ}\frac{M_i}{E}=\frac{\beta }{M_{pl}}\frac{1}{\pi ^2}T\underset{i}{}M_i^3K_1(M_i/T),$$
(23)
where $`n_i`$ and $`E`$ are the number density and energy of the RH neutrinos respectively, $``$ indicates thermal average. In the last step of the equation we have taken the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of the RH neutrinos for simplicity and $`K_1`$ is the modified Bessel function. The energy density of Quintessence is taken the same form as $`\rho _Q=\dot{Q}^2/2+V(Q)`$ in this case.

We then solve the equation (22) numerically, assuming $`\overline{M}_3=10\overline{M}_2=100\overline{M}_1`$. The numerical results are shown in Figs. 6 and 7. In Fig. 6, we take $`\overline{M}_1=3.1\times 10^9`$ GeV, $`\beta =2.5`$, which gives rise to $`Q_00`$ and $`Q_D=1.374M_{pl}`$. We then have $`K31`$ and $`M_1^D10^8GeV`$, corresponding to the case we considered in the hierarchical neutrino spectrum. In Fig. 7 we choose the parameters $`\overline{M}_1=3.15\times 10^{10}GeV`$ and $`\beta =3.62`$. We find the values of $`Q_0`$ and $`Q_D`$ are almost the same as the above case. We then have $`K0.007`$ and $`M_1^D4.5\times 10^{12}GeV`$, corresponding to the case that satisfy our requirement for the degenerate neutrinos.

Comparing Figs. 6 and 7 with Fig. 5, one can see that the interaction of Quintessence with the RH neutrinos does change the early behavior of the Quintessence field $`Q`$ and its equation of state, however, does not change the tracking properties of this model. Furthermore, the value of Quintessence field $`Q`$ remains a constant in this model until $`T10^4GeV`$ which satisfies our assumption for a constant $`K`$ during the period of leptogenesis.

## V Summary and conclusion

The explanation of the baryon number asymmetry of the Universe remains a challenge for cosmological and particle physics. Among various theoretical models, leptogenesis is one of the most attractive scenarios. Especially, the minimal thermal leptogenesis only needs the minimal extension of the standard model, while the extension seems necessary in order to explain the neutrino oscillation experiments.

The minimal thermal leptogenesis is closely connected with the properties of the light neutrinos. Detailed studies show that, to generate the observed baryon asymmetry, the constraints $`M_110^{10}GeV`$ and $`m_i0.1eV`$ should be satisfied. These results disfavor the degenerate neutrino mass spectrum strongly and require a high reheating temperature.

We investigate in this paper the implications on the minimal thermal leptogenesis of a new scenario that the RH neutrinos couple with the Quintessence, whose evolution causes the masses of the RH neutrinos vary. We study the interplay of this coupling between the evolution of Quintessence and the leptogenesis. By solving the Boltzmann equations numerically we show that $`M_1`$, at the decay time, can be as low as about $`10^8GeV`$ and $`m_i`$, at the present epoch, can be as large as $`m_i0.2eV`$.

###### Acknowledgements.

We thank B. Feng for helpful discussions about the Quintessence evolution. This work is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under the Grand No. 10105004, 19925523, 10047004 and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China under Grant NO. NKBRSF G19990754. X. J. Bi is also supported in part by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation.


text:
# Coherent current transport in wide ballistic Josephson junctions

thanks: Present adress: Department of Physics, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, Bellville 7535, South Africa.thanks: Present adress: NTT Basic Research Labs., 3-1, Morinosato Wakamiya, Atsugi, Kanagawa, 243-0198, Japan.

## Abstract

We present an experimental and theoretical investigation of coherent current transport in wide ballistic superconductor-two dimensional electron gas-superconductor junctions. It is found experimentally that upon increasing the junction length, the subharmonic gap structure in the current-voltage characteristics is shifted to lower voltages, and the excess current at voltages much larger than the superconducting gap decreases. Applying a theory of coherent multiple Andreev reflection, we show that these observations can be explained in terms of transport through Andreev resonances.

Ballistic superconducting junctions are of great interest for studying fundamental properties of coherent electronic transport. The concept of Josephson effect in superconductor-normal metal-superconductor junctions was originally formulated for ballistic junctions Kulik . However, until recently, experiments could only be performed on metallic diffusive junctions, which has limited the range of phenomena observed. Experimental realization of the ballistic regime became possible when a high-mobility two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) was employed to connect superconducting (S) electrodes Takayanagi1 . The recent experimental interest Schapers  has been focused on junctions with InAs 2DEGs which form highly transparent 2DEG-S interfaces with large probability of Andreev reflection. Moreover, electrostatic gating Takayanagi1 ; Takayanagi2  has made it possible to control junction parameters.

The dc Josephson effect in ballistic S-2DEG-S junctions has been extensively studied both experimentally submicron ; Takayanagi1 ; Schapers ; Takayanagi2 ; dcjosephson  and theoretically Kresin . Less investigated are the transport properties of the junctions in the presence of a voltage bias between the superconductors, the regime of multiple Andreev reflection (MAR) Klapwijk . In particular, a conclusive experimental picture of the subharmonic gap structure (SGS) in the current-voltage characteristics is lacking. Moreover, the main tool for analyzing the experimentally observed current-voltage characteristics has been the theory of Octavio et alOTBK  (OTBK). However, this is not appropriate for junctions which show a dc Josephson effect, i.e. which are in the coherent transport regime, since the OTBK theory is restricted to incoherent MAR transport.

The theory for coherent MAR transport in junctions much shorter than the superconducting coherence length marusual  has with great accuracy explained experiments with atomic point contacts marqpc , both the details of the SGS at $`eV=2\mathrm{\Delta }/n`$ and the magnitude of the excess current at voltages much larger than the superconducting gap. This theory however cannot be directly applied to the experimentally studied junctions submicron ; Takayanagi1 ; Schapers ; Takayanagi2 ; dcjosephson , generally of lengths $`L`$ of the order of the superconducting coherence length $`\xi _0`$.

In this letter we report a systematic experimental investigation of coherent current transport in ballistic Nb-InAs-Nb juctions with 2DEG-S interfaces of high transparency. For every junction we investigated the three key transport characteristics: SGS, excess current, and critical Josephson current. All investigated junctions show a dc Josephson effect. Our main experimental observation is that the SGS is shifted down in voltage upon increasing the distance between the superconducting electrodes, i.e. the junction length. Moreover, the excess current is found to decrease with increasing junction length.

These observations can be explained within a coherent, multimode MAR-theory. The shift of the SGS results from transport through Andreev resonances Johansson ; Ingerman : the Andreev resonances, closely related to the Andreev levels carrying the dc Josephson current, are shifted to lower energies upon increasing the junction length, consequently shifting the SGS down in voltage. Similarly, the excess current decreases with increasing junction length for the experimentally relevant junction lengths, $`L\xi _0`$.

A schematic picture of the junction is shown in Fig. 1. Two niobium electrodes are deposited directly on the 2DEG which forms spontaneously at the surface of single crystal InAs details . In the following step, the junction is covered by a SiO2 layer that provides insulation to the Al gate electrode grown on top. On three different chips A,B,C, junctions of five different interelectrode distances $`L=105(\text{A}),115(\text{B}),145(\text{B}),160(\text{A})`$ and $`200(\text{C})`$ nm have been fabricated. All junctions have a width $`W=50\mu `$m. The sheet carrier density $`n_\text{s}`$, the effective mass $`m^{}`$ and the mobility $`\mu `$ are controlled with the top gate to give the largest 2DEG-conductance. Typical parameters for the unprocessed InAs are $`n_\text{s}=2\times 10^{16}`$ m-2 and $`m^{}=0.033m_\text{e}`$, where $`m_\text{e}`$ is the free electron mass. This gives a Fermi wave length $`\lambda _\text{F}=18`$ nm and $`v_\text{F}=1.2\times 10^6`$ ms-1. The mobility was not measured on the actual samples, but is typically of order $`\mu =10000`$ cm2(Vs)-1. The measured critical temperature of Nb $`T_\text{c}=9.0`$ K corresponds to a superconducting gap $`\mathrm{\Delta }=1.4`$ meV close to the bulk value. The superconducting coherence length is thus $`\xi _0=\mathrm{}v_\text{F}/\mathrm{\Delta }=600`$ nm.

The normal resistance $`R_\text{N}`$ was measured at a voltage $`eV\mathrm{\Delta }`$. The ratio between the Sharvin resistance $`R_{\text{Sh}}=h/(2e^2)[\lambda _\text{F}/2W]`$ and the normal resistance, i.e. the average transmission probability per conduction mode, is $`D0.7`$ for $`n_\text{s}>2\times 10^{16}`$ m-2 (see Fig. 1). The interfaces between the 2DEG and the metal electrodes are thus highly transparent. Attributing the small difference in resistance between the $`105`$ and $`160`$ nm junction to impurity scattering gives a mean free path $`l300`$ nm. This demonstrates that the transport is in the ballistic regime ($`L<l`$). All junctions show a dc Josephson current, with $`I_\text{c}R_\text{N}`$ products $`0.6,0.55,0.52,0.45`$ at $`1.8`$ K monotonically decreasing with $`L`$ from $`L=105`$ to $`200`$ nm. The temperature dependence of the dc Josephson current is shown in Fig. 1 for two junctions $`L=105`$ and $`160`$ nm.

In Fig. 2 the experimentally measured differential resistance for the different junctions is depicted. For all junctions, the resistance shows SGS at voltages $`eV<2\mathrm{\Delta }`$. As an overall tendency, the SGS is shifted to lower voltages when increasing junction length. For junctions on the same chip this holds strictly. All SGS-features are symmetric around $`V=0`$ and scale roughly with temperature like the gap $`\mathrm{\Delta }(T)`$, up to $`T_\text{c}`$.

A decrease in the excess current as a function of length $`L`$ is also observed in the experiment. The $`I_{\text{exc}}R_\text{N}`$ product for the different junctions is shown in Fig. 4 below, displaying an overall decrease with increasing $`L`$. This holds strictly, just as the shift of the SGS, for junctions on the same chip. The systematic shift of the SGS and the decrease of the excess current with junction length are the main experimental observations in this work.

Based on these findings, we model the junction as a ballistic, two-dimensional normal conductor of length $`L`$ and width $`W`$ connected to two bulk superconducting electrodes via highly transparent interfaces. The normal reflection in the junction is assumed to be concentrated to the kink in the 2DEG formed during the junction processing, see Fig. 1. For simplicity, the normal reflection is taken to be specular, reducing the problem to summing over independent modes. The width of the junction $`W\lambda _\text{F}`$, giving a number of transport modes $`2W/\lambda _\text{F}=5600`$. No sources of decoherence, e.g. inelastic scattering inelastic , are taken into account in the model.

We perform our theoretical analysis within the scattering approach to the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equation Datta . This allows us to express the dc Josephson current Brouwer96  as well as the current in voltage biased junctions Johansson  in terms of the transmission and reflection amplitudes $`t_m(E)`$ and $`r_m(E)`$ of each transport mode $`m`$ and the mode independent Andreev reflection probability $`\alpha (E)`$ at the 2DEG-S interface. The scattering amplitudes are given by $`r_m=i\sqrt{R}(1+q_m^2)/(1+Rq_m^2)`$ and $`t_m=q_m(1R)/(1+Rq_m^2)`$ where $`q_m=\text{exp}[ik_mL]`$; $`k_m(E)=[2m^{}/\mathrm{}^2(E_\text{F}E_m+E)]^{1/2}`$, where $`E_\text{F}`$ is the Fermi energy and $`E_m`$ is the transverse mode energy. The reflection probability of each interface $`R`$, taken to be mode independent, is given from the averaged total transmission probability $`D`$ as $`R=(1D)/(1+D)`$, giving $`R=0.16`$ for $`D=0.72`$ ($`D`$ for the $`105`$ nm junction at $`n_\text{s}=2\times 10^{16}`$ m-2).

The Andreev reflection amplitude at the 2DEG-S interface is given by $`\alpha (E)=\text{exp}[i\text{arccos}(E/\mathrm{\Delta })]`$. It is however not possible to apriori conclude that quasiparticles are Andreev reflected directly at the 2DEG-S interface near the kink, they might spend a certain time $`\mathrm{}/E_\text{A}`$ underneath the superconductor dwelltime . This can be incorporated into the model in the simplest possible way by multiplying $`\alpha (E)`$ with a phase factor $`\text{exp}(iE/E_\text{A})`$, where $`E_\text{A}`$ has to be determined by comparison to the experimental data. Aminov

The total dc-current can be written as a sum of the currents for the individual modes summodes , i.e. $`I=_mI_m`$. In the general case, it is not possible to analytically calculate the current for arbitrary voltage, but one has to resort to numerics. It is important to note that most transport modes $`m`$ have effective lengths $`L/\sqrt{1(m/N)^2}`$ close to the physical length $`L`$. Thus, the sharp features in the SGS predicted in single mode junctions of finite length Ingerman  are not washed out but are merely broadened by the summation over the modes.

The qualitative behavior of the SGS as a function of junction length is clear from the numerics in Fig. 3. One sees how the SGS are shifted down to lower voltages when increasing the junction length $`L`$. The nature of this effect is the shift of broadened MAR resonances Johansson ; Ingerman . The MAR resonances are closely related to the Andreev levels carrying the dc Josephson current. The Andreev levels are shifted towards lower energies upon increasing the junction length, leading to a corresponding shift in the SGS. Additional numerics shows that the general tendency of a shift of the SGS towards lower voltages is independent of the reflection probability $`R`$, while the details of the SGS depend on $`R`$. For perfectly transparent 2DEG-S interfaces, however, the SGS are absent for $`kT\mathrm{\Delta }`$ Klapwijk  for any junction length Ingerman .

Quantitatively, we have performed a detailed numerical investigation of the SGS $`(n=15)`$ in the experimentally relevant limit of small normal reflectivity, $`R0.16`$ and small effective junction length, $`L_{\text{eff}}<\xi _\text{0}`$. The effective length $`L_{\text{eff}}=L+\mathrm{}v_\text{F}/E_\text{A}`$ is the sum of the geometric length of the junction $`L`$ and the distance $`\mathrm{}v_\text{F}/E_\text{A}`$ the quasiparticles propagate under the superconductors before they are Andreev reflected. The analysis of the numerical results shows that close to $`V=2\mathrm{\Delta }/en`$ the second derivative dercom  $`d^2I/dV^2`$ has minima which depend on junction length as

$$V_{\text{min}}=\frac{2\mathrm{\Delta }}{en}\left(10.4\frac{L_{\text{eff}}}{\xi _\text{0}}\right),n=1,2,..$$
(1)
for $`L_{\text{eff}}<0.4\xi _\text{0}`$ for all $`n`$ (for $`n>1`$, it holds for even longer $`L_{\text{eff}}`$). This length dependence is in strong contrast to the result of the theory of incoherent MAR OTBK , which predicts dips in the second derivative at voltages $`V_{\text{min}}=2\mathrm{\Delta }/en`$ independent of junction length Zimmermann .

Comparing theory and experiment, we see that the coherent MAR theory (Fig. 3) is able to explain the overall shift in the experimentally observed SGS towards lower voltage for increasing junction length $`L`$ (see Fig. 2). However, to fit the measured positions of the dips in the second derivative with Eq. (1), one needs to include an additional length $`\mathrm{}v_\text{F}/E_\text{A}`$. The best fit, including the SGS to fifth order, is obtained for $`\mathrm{}v_\text{F}/E_\text{A}=0.54\xi _\text{0}`$ for both junctions on chip A, $`0.7\xi _\text{0}`$ for both junctions on chip B and $`0.7\xi _\text{0}`$ for chip C. We note that the values for the effective lengths $`L_{\text{eff}}`$ are partly outside the range of validity of Eq. (1), which might introduce some error in the fitted values $`\mathrm{}v_\text{F}/E_\text{A}`$. The fact that the junctions on the same chip give the same $`E_\text{A}`$ suggests that $`E_\text{A}`$ is sensitive to the sample preparation.

Although the dip and peak positions of the SGS can be well reproduced by the theory, the theoretically calculated amplitudes (not shown) of the SGS-features are much larger than the ones observed in the experiment. One reason might be residual inelastic scattering or dephasing, not taken into account in the model. Another reason might be that the theory assumes a voltage bias, while the measurements are carried out with current bias, giving rise to voltage fluctuations which smear the SGS.

The experimentally measured excess current $`I_{\text{exc}}=IV/R_\text{N}`$ at voltages $`V\mathrm{\Delta }/e`$ is presented in the left panel in Fig. 4. As seen from numerics in the right panel of Fig. 4, for both $`E_\text{A}=1.4\mathrm{\Delta }`$ and $`1.8\mathrm{\Delta }`$, the excess current decreases monotonically with junction length $`L`$ for all lengths $`L<\xi _\text{0}`$, in qualitative agreement with the experiment. However, this decay is slower than the measured one. Moreover, the theoretical excess current exceeds the experimental one. This discrepancy can be attributed to residual inelastic scattering, similar to the suppression of the amplitude of the SGS mentioned above. The excess current is carried by quasiparticles which traverse the junction one and two times. The single-particle processes give a negative contribution to the excess current while the two-particle processes yield a positive contribution. Since quasiparticles carrying the two-particle current spend longer time in the junction, inelastic scattering leads to a stronger suppression of the two-particle current compared to the one-particle current. This results in an excess current with a stronger length-dependent decay than predicted by the coherent theory.

We also compare the experimentally measured dc Josephson currents with the result of the model. The expression for Josephson current in terms of the normal scattering amplitudes and the Andreev reflection amplitudes is given in Ref. Brouwer96 . Using the value of $`E_\text{A}`$ deduced from the SGS fitting, we see in Fig. 1 that the temperature dependence of the experimentally measured critical current is well reproduced by the theory. However, the theoretical overall magnitude is $`1.65`$ times (for $`L=105`$ nm) resp. $`2.4`$ times (for $`L=160`$ nm) larger than the experimental value. This discrepancy indicates, in line with the discussion for the SGS-amplitude and the excess current above, the presence of some decoherenece mechanism. Note that the discrepancy is much smaller than previously reported submicron ; Takayanagi1 ; Takayanagi2 , because the longer effective junction length reduces the theoretical critical current to a value more similar to the experimental one. The significant part is that this effective length has been determined from a best fitting to the SGS.

In conclusion, we have studied, experimentally and theoretically, coherent current transport in wide ballistic S-2DEG-S junctions. It is found experimentally that both the SGS and the excess current show a systematic dependence on length of the junction. We show that these observations can be qualitatively explained within a coherent theory of MAR. Our investigation also points towards additional mechanisms, e.g. decoherence, to be included in the theory to obtain a quantitative agreement with experiments.

The work was supported by MANEP (P.S.), STINT (Å.I.), the Humboldt Foundation, the BMBF and the ZIP-programme of the German government (G.J.), the Swedish grant agencies TFR (P.S.), SSF (V.S.), VR (G.W., V.S.) and KVA (E.B.), and by the DFG via SFB 508 (R.K., A.R., T.M. and U.M.)