Electron cooling by phonons in superconducting proximity structures

Abstract

We investigate the electron-phonon cooling power in disordered electronic systems with a special focus on mesoscopic superconducting proximity structures. Employing the quasiclassical Keldysh Green's function method, we obtain a general expression for the cooling power perturbative in the electron-phonon coupling, but valid for arbitrary electronic systems out of equilibrium. We apply our theory to several disordered electronic systems valid for an arbitrary relation between the thermal phonon wavelength and the electronic mean free path due to impurity scattering. Besides recovering the known results for bulk normal metals and BCS superconductors, we consider two experimentally relevant geometries of superconductor-normal metal proximity contacts. Both structures feature a significantly suppressed cooling power at low temperatures related to the existence of a minigap in the quasiparticle spectrum. This improved isolation low cooling feature in combination with the high tunability makes such structures highly promising candidates for quantum calorimetry.