Transport and heating effect in proximity superconducting structures

In this paper, we emphasise the role of heating effect in superconducting mesoscopic systems. We studied two different samples exhibiting two major superconducting mesoscopic effects (reflectionless tunnelling and reentrance). First. we measured the subgap conductance of titanium nitride (superconductor, T-c = 4.6 K) highly doped silicon (degenerated semiconductor) SIN junctions, where I stands for the Schottky barrier. Then, we studied metallic Al/Cu AlO3/Cu (SNIN) structures which show at low energies a reentrance like behaviour. We show that it is necessary to introduce electron effective temperature in the non-linear transport to reconcile voltage and temperature dependences. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.