Thermal transport in superconductor heterostructures: some recent progress

This article reviews recent advances in low-temperature electronic thermal transport properties of thermally biased superconductor heterostructures focusing on the two-terminal transport. Since the last decade, ferromagnetism has been widely used to enhance the thermoelectricity in heterostructures based on ordinary superconductors. The possibility of getting giant thermoelectric effects with optimum thermal conductance by breaking the electron-hole symmetry of the ordinary superconductor boosted the research in this direction. Recently, attention has been paid to the role of triplet Cooper pairs that emerged in ferromagnetic junctions and the possibility of advanced applications. Other forms of magnetism, specifically antiferromagnetism and altermagnetism, have been investigated to unravel the behavior of the thermal and charge current in thermally biased junctions. In parallel to ordinary superconductors, junctions with unconventional superconductors have been explored for the same purpose. Thermal transport in superconducting bilayers has been studied using advanced materials like Dirac and topological materials, including Weyl semimetals. Significant attention has been paid to thermally biased topological Josephson junctions to explore the phase-tunable current in recent times. Weyl Josephson junctions, multi-terminal Josephson junctions, and various other multilayer junctions have also been studied to engineer large thermoelectric effects and various functionalities with potential applications in superconductor-based thermal device components.