Contact resistance dependence of crossed Andreev reflection

We report experiments in nanometer-scaled superconductor/normal metal hybrid devices which show that in a small window of contact resistances, crossed Andreev reflection (CAR) can dominate the nonlocal transport for all energies below the superconducting gap. Besides crossed Andreev reflection, elastic cotunneling (EC) and nonlocal charge imbalance can be identified as competing subgap transport mechanisms in temperature-dependent four-terminal nonlocal measurements. We demonstrate a systematic change of the nonlocal resistance vs. bias characteristics with increasing contact resistances, which can be varied in the fabrication process. For samples with higher contact resistances, CAR is weakened relative to EC in the midgap regime, possibly due to dynamical Coulomb blockade. Gaining control of crossed Andreev reflection is an important step towards the realization of a solid-state entangler. Copyright c (C) EPLA, 2009