The effect of Cooper pair tunneling through thin insulator separating two bulk superconductors predicted by Brian Josephson as early as in 1962 and awarded by the Nobel Prize, reveals the novel field of the solid state – the physics of tunneling effects in superconductors. In particular, a studying of Josephson contact makes an opportunity to observe a time dilation right in the laboratory. A plenty of effects occurring in various tunneling structures based on superconductors, insulators, metals, and ferromagnetics attracts researchers not only from fundamental point of view. Tunneling spectroscopy of superconductors is a direct experimental method providing a determination of the main energy characteristic of the superconductor – the superconducting order parameter – with the highest accuracy. Its magnitude, symmetry and temperature dependence govern the physics of the superconducting subsystem, thus provides making important conclusions about the superconducting mechanisms. In our lab, tunneling structures of superconductor-insulator-superconductor and superconductor-metal-superconductor are created using an unique “break-junction” technique, that has a set of advantages as compared to other popular techniques and facilitates getting the world-level results.

Our researchers give the lecture courses “Introduction to superconductivity”, “Tunneling effects in superconductors”, and “High-temperature superconductivity”. Our students are actively involved to the experimental process from the first days, publish the obtained results and deliver it at various conferences.