We show that in ultrasmall superconducting grains any concentration of magnetic impurities or infinitely small orbital effect of magnetic field leads to destruction of the hard gap in the tunneling density of states, and find analytically the exponential tail at low energies. Thus, the tunneling density of states exhibits the "soft gap" behavior. As the energy approaches zero, it vanishes linea...

We find that spin polarized disordered Fermi liquids are unstable to the nucleation of superconducting pairing states at mesoscopic scales even in magnetic fields substantially higher than the critical one. We study the probability of finding superconducting pairing states at mesoscopic scales in this limit. We find that the distribution function depends only on the film conductance. The typica...

The presence of spin-orbit scattering within an aluminum nanoparticle affects measurements of the discrete energy levels within the particle by ~1! reducing the effective g factor below the free-electron value of 2, ~2! causing avoided crossings as a function of magnetic field between predominantly spin-up and predominantly spin-down levels, and ~3! introducing magnetic-field-dependent changes ...