No Arabic abstract
We investigate the coherent energy and thermal transport in a temperature-biased long Josephson tunnel junction, when a Josephson vortex, i.e., a soliton, steadily drifts driven by an electric bias current. We demonstrate that thermal transport through the junction can be controlled by the bias current, since it determines the steady-state velocity of the drifting soliton. We study the effects on thermal transport of the damping affecting the soliton dynamics. In fact, a soliton locally influences the power flowing through the junction and can cause the variation of the temperature of the device. When the soliton speed increases approaching its limiting value, i.e., the Swihart velocity, we demonstrate that the soliton-induces thermal effects significantly modify. Finally, we discuss how the appropriate material selection of the superconductors forming the junction is essential, since short quasiparticle relaxation times are required to observe fast thermal effects.
We explore the coherent thermal transport sustained by solitons through a long Josephson junction, as a thermal gradient across the system is established. We observe that a soliton causes the heat current through the system to increase. Correspondingly, the junction warms up in correspondence of the soliton, with temperature peaks up to, e.g., approximately 56 mK for a realistic Nb-based proposed setup at a bath temperature Tbath = 4.2 K. The thermal effects on the dynamics of the soliton are also discussed. Markedly, this system inherits the topological robustness of the solitons. In view of these results, the proposed device can effectively find an application as a superconducting thermal router in which the thermal transport can be locally mastered through solitonic excitations, which positions can be externally controlled through a magnetic field and a bias current.
We show experimentally that a dc biased Josephson junction in series with a high-enough impedance microwave resonator emits antibunched photons. Our resonator is made of a simple micro-fabricated spiral coil that resonates at 4.4 GHz and reaches a 1.97 k$Omega$ characteristic impedance. The second order correlation function of the power leaking out of the resonator drops down to 0.3 at zero delay, which demonstrates the antibunching of the photons emitted by the circuit at a rate of 6 $10^7$ photons per second. Results are found in quantitative agreement with our theoretical predictions. This simple scheme could offer an efficient and bright single-photon source in the microwave domain.
The ac Josephson effect in a ferromagnetic Josephson junction, which is composed of two superconductors separated by a ferromagnetic metal (FM), is studied by a tunneling Hamiltonian and Greens function method. We obtain two types of superconducting phase dependent current, i.e., Josephson current and quasiparticle-pair-interference current (QPIC). These currents change their signs with thickness of the FM layer due to the 0-$pi$ transition characteristic to the ferromagnetic Josephson junction. As a function of applied voltage, the Josephson critical current shows a logarithmic divergence called the Riedel peak at the gap voltage, while the QPIC shows a discontinuous jump. The Riedel peak reverses due to the 0-$pi$ transition and disappears near the 0-$pi$ transition point. The discontinuous jump in the QPIC also represents similar behaviors to the Riedel peak. These results are in contrast to the conventional ones.
We investigate the behavior of a Josephson junction consisting of a ferromagnetic insulator-superconductor (FI-S) bilayer tunnel-coupled to a superconducting electrode. We show that the Josephson coupling in the structure is strenghtened by the presence of the spin-splitting field induced in the FI-S bilayer. Such strenghtening manifests itself as an increase of the critical current $I_c$ with the amplitude of the exchange field. Furthermore, the effect can be strongly enhanced if the junction is taken out of equilibrium by a temperature bias. We propose a realistic setup to assess experimentally the magnitude of the induced exchange field, and predict a drastic deviation of the $I_c(T)$ curve ($T$ is the temperature) with respect to equilibrium.
We theoretically investigate the critical current of a thermally-biased SIS Josephson junction formed by electrodes made by different BCS superconductors. The response of the device is analyzed as a function of the asymmetry parameter, $r=T_{c_1} /T_{c_2}$. We highlight the appearance of jumps in the critical current of an asymmetric junction, namely, when $r eq1$. In fact, in such case at temperatures at which the BCS superconducting gaps coincide, the critical current suddenly increases or decreases. In particular, we thoroughly discuss the counterintuitively behaviour of the critical current, which increases by enhancing the temperature of one lead, instead of monotonically reducing. In this case, we found that the largest jump of the critical current is obtained for moderate asymmetries, $rsimeq3$. In view of these results, the discussed behavior can be speculatively proposed as a temperature-based threshold single-photon detector with photon-counting capabilities, which operates non-linearly in the non-dissipative channel.