No Arabic abstract
Short ballistic graphene Josephson junctions sustain superconducting current with a non-sinusoidal current-phase relation up to a critical current threshold. The current-phase relation, arising from proximitized superconductivity, is gate-voltage tunable and exhibits peculiar skewness observed in high quality graphene superconductors heterostructures with clean interfaces. These properties make graphene Josephson junctions promising sensitive quantum probes of microscopic fluctuations underlying transport in two-dimensions. We show that the power spectrum of the critical current fluctuations has a characteristic $1/f$ dependence on frequency, $f$, probing two points and higher correlations of carrier density fluctuations of the graphene channel induced by carrier traps in the nearby substrate. Tunability with the Fermi level, close to and far from the charge neutrality point, and temperature dependence of the noise amplitude are clear fingerprints of the underlying material-inherent processes. Our results suggest a roadmap for the analysis of decoherence sources in the implementation of coherent devices by hybrid nanostructures.
The current-phase relation (CPR) of a Josephson junction (JJ) determines how the supercurrent evolves with the superconducting phase difference across the junction. Knowledge of the CPR is essential in order to understand the response of a JJ to various external parameters. Despite the rising interest in ultra-clean encapsulated graphene JJs, the CPR of such junctions remains unknown. Here, we use a fully gate-tunable graphene superconducting quantum intereference device (SQUID) to determine the CPR of ballistic graphene JJs. Each of the two JJs in the SQUID is made with graphene encapsulated in hexagonal boron nitride. By independently controlling the critical current of the JJs, we can operate the SQUID either in a symmetric or asymmetric configuration. The highly asymmetric SQUID allows us to phase-bias one of the JJs and thereby directly obtain its CPR. The CPR is found to be skewed, deviating significantly from a sinusoidal form. The skewness can be tuned with the gate voltage and oscillates in anti-phase with Fabry-P{e}rot resistance oscillations of the ballistic graphene cavity. We compare our experiments with tight-binding calculations which include realistic graphene-superconductor interfaces and find a good qualitative agreement.
We investigate the critical current, $I_C$, of ballistic Josephson junctions made of encapsulated graphene/boron-nitride heterostructures. We observe a crossover from the short to the long junction regimes as the length of the device increases. In long ballistic junctions, $I_S$ is found to scale as $propto exp(-k_bT/delta E)$. The extracted energies $delta E$ are independent of the carrier density and proportional to the level spacing of the ballistic cavity, as determined from Fabry-Perot oscillations of the junction normal resistance. As $Trightarrow 0$ the critical current of a long (or short) junction saturates at a level determined by the product of $delta E$ (or $Delta$) and the number of the junctions transversal modes.
Hybrid graphene-superconductor devices have attracted much attention since the early days of graphene research. So far, these studies have been limited to the case of diffusive transport through graphene with poorly defined and modest quality graphene-superconductor interfaces, usually combined with small critical magnetic fields of the superconducting electrodes. Here we report graphene based Josephson junctions with one-dimensional edge contacts of Molybdenum Rhenium. The contacts exhibit a well defined, transparent interface to the graphene, have a critical magnetic field of 8 Tesla at 4 Kelvin and the graphene has a high quality due to its encapsulation in hexagonal boron nitride. This allows us to study and exploit graphene Josephson junctions in a new regime, characterized by ballistic transport. We find that the critical current oscillates with the carrier density due to phase coherent interference of the electrons and holes that carry the supercurrent caused by the formation of a Fabry-P{e}rot cavity. Furthermore, relatively large supercurrents are observed over unprecedented long distances of up to 1.5 $mu$m. Finally, in the quantum Hall regime we observe broken symmetry states while the contacts remain superconducting. These achievements open up new avenues to exploit the Dirac nature of graphene in interaction with the superconducting state.
We calculate the phase, the temperature and the junction length dependence of the supercurrent for ballistic graphene Josephson-junctions. For low temperatures we find non-sinusoidal dependence of the supercurrent on the superconductor phase difference for both short and long junctions. The skewness, which characterizes the deviation of the current-phase relation from a simple sinusoidal one, shows a linear dependence on the critical current for small currents. We discuss the similarities and differences with respect to the classical theory of Josephson junctions, where the weak link is formed by a diffusive or ballistic metal. The relation to other recent theoretical results on graphene Josephson junctions is pointed out and the possible experimental relevance of our work is considered as well.
We perform extensive analysis of graphene Josephson junctions embedded in microwave circuits. By comparing a diffusive junction at 15 mK with a ballistic one at 15 mK and 1 K, we are able to reconstruct the current-phase relation.