Interlayer Tunneling of Quasiparticles and Cooper Pairs in Bi-2212 Single Crystal Whiskers

The interlayer tunneling has been studied on high quality Bi-2212 stacks of micron to the submicron lateral size. We found that low temperature and low voltage tunneling I-V characteristics can be self-consistently described by Fermi-liquid model for a d-wave superconductor with a significant contribution from coherent interlayer tunneling. The gap and pseudogap interplay with variation of temperature and magnetic field has been extracted from the I-V characteristics. We consider also the role of charging effects for submicron stacks.