Cooling of a suspended nanowire by an AC Josephson current flow

Gustav Sonne, Milton E. Peña-Aza, Leonid Y. Gorelik, Robert I. Shekhter, Mats Jonson

Published 2010-02-05, updated 2010-11-05Version 2

We consider a nanoelectromechanical Josephson junction, where a suspended nanowire serves as a superconducting weak link, and show that an applied DC bias voltage an result in suppression of the flexural vibrations of the wire. This cooling effect is achieved through the transfer of vibronic energy quanta first to voltage driven Andreev states and then to extended quasiparticle electronic states. Our analysis, which is performed for a nanowire in the form of a metallic carbon nanotube and in the framework of the density matrix formalism, shows that such self-cooling is possible down to a level where the average occupation number of the lowest flexural vibration mode of the nanowire is $\sim 0.1$.