Thin film heterostructures composed of superconducting electrodes (molybdenum rhenium alloy) and a nanoscale silicon layer doped with tungsten, have been designed and experimentally studied. The current-voltage characteristics of junctions exhibiting local maxima of the current against the background of abrupt current increases for the first time, were measured in the voltage range of −800 to 800 mV, at temperatures of 4.2–8 K. The positions of these singularities, which are symmetrical with respect to zero voltage, varied from sample to sample within the range of 40–300 mV. With increasing temperature, they became blurred and completely vanished with the disappearance of superconductivity in the electrodes. The nature of the observed singularities is associated with the properties of electron tunneling through the impurity states localized in the semiconducting barrier. The use of a superconducting electrode enhances the interaction of the localized electron with the conduction electrons thanks to the root divergence in the density of electron states of a superconductor.

Following the ever-rising demand for new functionalities and novel materials in superconducting circuitry, we provide a complete view on the self-shunting problem in Josephson junctions relating it to specific features of a multichannel weak link between electrodes where averaging over the channels yields a bimodal distribution of transparencies with maxima near unity and zero. We provide two examples of such internally-shunted devices, four-layered Nb/Al-Al oxide-Nb junctions with strongly disordered nm-thick insulating layers where stochastic distribution of transparencies takes place on a local rather than a global scale and MoRe/W-doped Si-Si-MoRe devices with strongly inhomogeneous silicon interlayers partly doped by metallic nanoclusters where the main charge transport occurs across resonance-percolating trajectories. We show how the predicted universal distribution function of transmission coefficients can be verified experimentally without any fitting parameters and analyze some old and new experimental data from this perspective. We believe that our results can form a base for novel four-layered Josephson junctions with enhanced superconducting properties and, at the same time, well-separated metallic electrodes.

We report a study of the electron tunneling transport in point-contact junctions formed by a sharp Ag tip and two different highly correlated oxides, namely, a magnetoresistive manganite La 0.66 Ca 0.34 MnO 3 and a superconducting cuprate LaBa 2 Cu 3 O 7-x . Strong chemical modifications of the oxide surface (supposedly, oxygen ion displacements) caused by applying high voltages to the junctions have been observed. This effect is believed to be responsible for an enormous growth of inelastic tunneling processes across a transition region that reveals itself in an overall «V»-shaped conductance background, with a strong temperature impact. The mechanism of the inelastic scattering is ascribed to charge transmission across magnetically active interfaces between two electrodes forming the junction. To support the latter statement, we have fabricated planar junctions between Cr and Ag films with an antiferromagnetic chromium oxide Cr 2 O 3 as a potential barrier and at high-bias voltages have found an identical conductance trend with a similar temperature effect.

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