Heat-Mode Excitation in a Proximity Superconductor.

Mesoscopic superconductivity deals with various quasiparticle excitation modes, only one of them-the charge-mode-being directly accessible for conductance measurements due to the imbalance in populations of quasi-electron and quasihole excitation branches. Other modes carrying heat or even spin, valley etc. currents populate the branches equally and are charge-neutral, which makes them much harder to control.

Strategy for accurate thermal biasing at the nanoscale.

We analyze the benefits and shortcomings of a thermal control in nanoscale electronic conductors by means of the contact heating scheme. Ideally, this straightforward approach allows one to apply a known thermal bias across nanostructures directly through metallic leads, avoiding conventional substrate intermediation. We show, by using the average noise thermometry and local noise sensing technique in InAs nanowire-based devices, that a nanoscale metallic constriction on a SiO substrate acts like a diffusive conductor with negligible electron-phonon relaxation and non-ideal leads.

Impact of diffusion on transverse dispersion in two-dimensional ordered and random porous media.

Solute dispersion in fluid flow results from the interaction between advection and diffusion. The relative contributions of these two mechanisms to mass transport are characterized by the reduced velocity ν, also referred to as the Péclet number. In the absence of diffusion (i.