Quasiparticle cooling using a topological insulator–superconductor hybrid junction

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the thermoelectric properties of a hybrid junction realised coupling surface states of a three-dimensional topological insulator with a conventional s-wave superconductor. We focus on the ballistic devices and study the quasiparticle flow, carrying both electric and thermal currents, adopting a scattering matrix approach based on conventional Blonder–Tinkham–Klapwijk formalism. We calculate the cooling efficiency of the junction as a function of the microscopic parameters of the normal region (i.e. the chemical potential, etc.). The cooling power increases when moving from a regime of Andreev specular-reflection to a regime where Andreev retro-reflection dominates. Differently from the case of a conventional N/S interface, we can achieve efficient cooling of the normal region, without including any explicit impurity scattering at the interface, to increase normal reflection.