No Arabic abstract
We have developed a quantitative theory of Cooper pair pumping in gated one-dimensional arrays of Josephson junctions. The pumping accuracy is limited by quantum tunneling of Cooper pairs out of the propagating potential well and by direct supercurrent flow through the array. Both corrections decrease exponentially with the number N of junctions in the array, but give a serious limitation of accuracy for any practical array. The supercurrent at resonant gate voltages decreases with N only as sin(v/N)/N, where v is the Josephson phase difference across the array.
The Hamiltonian operator for an unbiased array of Josephson junctions with gate voltages is constructed when only Cooper pair tunnelling and charging effects are taken into account. The supercurrent through the system and the pumped current induced by changing the gate voltages periodically are discussed with an emphasis on the inaccuracies in the Cooper pair pumping. Renormalisation of the Hamiltonian operator is used in order to reliably parametrise the effects due to inhomogeneity in the array and non-ideal gating sequences. The relatively simple model yields an explicit, testable prediction based on three experimentally motivated and determinable parameters.
We investigate mesoscopic Josephson junction arrays created by patterning superconducting disks on monolayer graphene, concentrating on the high-$T/T_c$ regime of these devices and the phenomena which contribute to the superconducting glass state in diffusive arrays. We observe features in the magnetoconductance at rational fractions of flux quanta per array unit cell, which we attribute to the formation of flux-quantized vortices. The applied fields at which the features occur are well described by Ginzburg-Landau simulations that take into account the number of unit cells in the array. We find that the mean conductance and universal conductance fluctuations are both enhanced below the critical temperature and field of the superconductor, with greater enhancement away from the graphene Dirac point.
We study the spin transport through a 1D quantum Ising-XY-Ising spin link that emulates a topological superconducting-normal-superconducting structure via Jordan-Wigner (JW) transformation. We calculate, both analytically and numerically, the spectrum of spin Andreev bound states and the resulting $mathbb{Z}_2$ fractional spin Josephson effect (JE) pertaining to the emerging Majorana JW fermions. Deep in the topological regime, we identify an effective time-reversal symmetry that leads to $mathbb{Z}_4$ fractional spin JE in the $textit{presence}$ of interactions within the junction. Moreover, we uncover a hidden inversion time-reversal symmetry that protects the $mathbb{Z}_4$ periodicity in chains with an odd number of spins, even in the $textit{absence}$ of interactions. We also analyze the entanglement between pairs of spins by evaluating the concurrence in the presence of spin current and highlight the effects of the JW Majorana states. We propose to use a microwave cavity setup for detecting the aforementioned JEs by dispersive readout methods and show that, surprisingly, the $mathbb{Z}_2$ periodicity is immune to $textit{any}$ local magnetic perturbations. Our results are relevant for a plethora of spin systems, such as trapped ions, photonic lattices, electron spins in quantum dots, or magnetic impurities on surfaces.
We study adiabatic charge transfer in a superconducting Cooper pair pump, focusing on the influence of current measurement on coherence. We investigate the limit where the Josephson coupling energy $E_J$ between the various parts of the system is small compared to the Coulomb charging energy $E_C$. In this case the charge transferred in a pumping cycle $Q_P sim 2e$, the charge of one Cooper pair: the main contribution is due to incoherent Cooper pair tunneling. We are particularly interested in the quantum correction to $Q_P$, which is due to coherent tunneling of pairs across the pump and which depends on the superconducting phase difference $phi_0$ between the electrodes: $1-Q_P/(2e) sim (E_J/E_C) cos phi_0$. A measurement of $Q_P$ tends to destroy the phase coherence. We first study an arbitrary measuring circuit and then specific examples and show that coherent Cooper pair transfer can in principle be detected using an inductively shunted ammeter.
Majorana zero modes are quasiparticle states localized at the boundaries of topological superconductors that are expected to be ideal building blocks for fault-tolerant quantum computing. Several observations of zero-bias conductance peaks measured in tunneling spectroscopy above a critical magnetic field have been reported as experimental indications of Majorana zero modes in superconductor/semiconductor nanowires. On the other hand, two dimensional systems offer the alternative approach to confine Ma jorana channels within planar Josephson junctions, in which the phase difference {phi} between the superconducting leads represents an additional tuning knob predicted to drive the system into the topological phase at lower magnetic fields. Here, we report the observation of phase-dependent zero-bias conductance peaks measured by tunneling spectroscopy at the end of Josephson junctions realized on a InAs/Al heterostructure. Biasing the junction to {phi} ~ {pi} significantly reduces the critical field at which the zero-bias peak appears, with respect to {phi} = 0. The phase and magnetic field dependence of the zero-energy states is consistent with a model of Majorana zero modes in finite-size Josephson junctions. Besides providing experimental evidence of phase-tuned topological superconductivity, our devices are compatible with superconducting quantum electrodynamics architectures and scalable to complex geometries needed for topological quantum computing.