Teaching



I will give a 20h graduate lectures on "Mesoscopic superconductivity" in April-May 2017.

The exploration of superconductivity at mesoscopic scales has known a continuous progress over the last thirty years. It has enabled the study of many fundamental issues, such as the minimal size for a material to become superconducting, how superconducting properties can be induced in a non-superconducting metal with the help of the proximity effect, or which new properties may result from the competition between the induced superconductivity and a magnetic order that would be a priori incompatible. These advances have also been useful to build superconducting quantum circuits, based on the Josephson effect. Hybrid superconducting systems are also promising for realizing Majorana bound states that are possible candidates to realize topologically protected quantum computation.

The aim of the lecture is to provide an introduction to the main concepts in this field. The course is addressed to anyone interested and having some basic knowledge in quantum mechanics, statistical physics, or condensed matter physics.

Lectures on Tuesdays April 4, 11, 25, and May 2 (9am-12am) and May 9, 16, 23, and 30 (9am-11am) in GreenEr - Polygone scientifique - Salle 2 D 006

Outline (with slides on related experiments):


Handwritten notes of the lecture given in 2015 can be found here.

Handwritten notes (in French) of a 3h lecture on "hybrid systems" given in 2012 in Cargese can be found here.

Lecture notes on "applications of symmetries in superconductivity" can be found here.



Useful textbooks on superconductivity:

Recent textbooks including a discussion of some aspects of mesoscopic superconductivity:

Pedagogical reviews on aspects of the proximity effect in mesoscopic superconductivity:

Pedagogical reviews on topological superconductivity and Majorana fermions: