Tunneling characteristics for nm-thick mesas consisting of a few intrinsic Josephson junctions

Very thin mesa structures consisting of a few intrinsic Josephson junctions have been fabricated on single crystal surfaces of Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ. In the fabrication procedure, annealing is conducted after the mesa structure is formed by Ar ion milling. Or, the annealing is skipped and, instead, the electrodes to the mesas have been deposited in vacuum immediately after crystals are cleaved. We have attained both uniform current-voltage (I-V) characteristics and small contact resistances, which are usually difficult to obtain at the same time in the case of nm-thick mesa structures. For the mesas thus fabricated, it is found that the Josephson critical current Jc of the top IJJ (the surface junction) is reduced significantly. The reduction of Jc is more significant when the doping level of the crystal used is lower. We argue that this is due to the proximity effect of the surface junction, in which the top electrode is in close proximity with the Ag or Au film of a thickness of the order of 300 nm. For mesas obtained by this method, the switching probability distribution has been measured. It is found that when the mesa lateral size is larger than 2 μm the switching is unreproducible and lacking systematic temperature dependence. It is also found that escape temperature Tesc and the standard deviation σ for the switching probability distribution exhibits a large deviation from the Kramers' thermal activation theory. When the lateral size is no larger than 2 μm, the switching probability distribution results show coincidence with the theory in the temperature range from 1.3 K to 5 K. Below 0.5 K, the escape temperature tends to saturate and indicates a crossover near 0.5 K from the thermal activation to the macroscopic quantum tunneling.