Conductance anomalies of small tunnel junctions inside the Coulomb gap

Abstract

A small-capacitance normal tunnel deviates significantly from equilibrium because each tunneling event turns the junction voltage almost upside-down. If such a sudden perturbation occurs locally, Fermi liquid theory guarantees that infinitely many electron-hole pairs should be created near the Fermi surface. It is predicted that such an infrared-divergent shake-up combined with the electromagnetic environment leads to subgap conductance anomalies for two categories of junctions. For symmetric junctions whose electrodes have the same electronic properties, a nonvanishing subgap conductance is shown to be inevitable even if the environmental impedance is infinite. This effect smoothes the current-voltage (I–V) characteristic and shifts the Coulomb offset extrapolated back from the high-voltage part of theI–V curve. For asymmetric junctions, whose electrodes have different electronic affinities, tunneling conductance is enhanced in one direction and suppressed in the other; that is, the junctions exhibit a diode effect. In particular, when the tunneling resistance is much smaller than the resistance quantum and the current flows in the favorable direction, a strong tendency towards establishing phase coherence is shown to emerge, as in Josephson junctions, resulting in infinite differential conductance at zero bias voltage.