Thermal computation and heat harvesting in hybrid superconducting tunnel junctions

In this thesis the charge and the heat tranport in hybrid superconducting tunnel junctions is discussed. A thermoelectric effect of recent prediction and discovery is exploited to design some proposals for heat harvesting purposes, like a contactless heat engine and a electronic refrigerator. A scheme for a temperature-based computation, based on the transport properties of a thermally-biased superconducting quantum interference proximity transistor (SQUIPT), is also presented. The experimental characterization of the charge transport in a SQUIPT is discussed in the last part of the thesis.