Low-Temperature Saturation of the Superconducting Properties Induced in Silver by the Proximity Effect

Abstract

Critical-field measurements of silver layers sandwiched between two superconducting layers indicate that supercooling appears below a temperature $T^{*}$ and that the supercooling field stays constant at low temperatures. We propose a simple theoretical model which correctly predicts the temperature of saturation as well as the observed amount of supercooling, and leads to an estimate of 0.1 for $\mathrm{NV}$ for silver. This model further suggests that a $\frac{1}{x}$ spatial dependence of the order parameter in the silver should be observed in the ${\mathrm{He}}^3$ temperature range and below.