KINETIC-EQUATION APPROACH TO DIFFUSIVE SUPERCONDUCTING HYBRID DEVICES

We present calculations of the temperature-dependent electrostatic and chemical potential distributions in disordered normal metal-supercond uctor structures. We show that they differ appreciably in the presence of a superconducting terminal and propose an experiment to measure th ese two different potential distributions. We also compute the resista nce change in these structures due to a recently proposed mechanism wh ich causes a finite effect at zero temperature. The relative resistanc e change due to this effect is of the order of the interaction paramet er in the normal metal. Finally a detailed calculation of the resistan ce change due to the temperature dependence of Andreev reflection in d iffusive systems is presented. We find that the maximal magnitude due to this thermal effect is in general much larger than the magnitude of the interaction effect.