English

Josephson junctions of multiple superconducting wires

Superconductivity 2018-05-30 v2 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

We study the spectrum of Andreev bound states and Josephson currents across a junction of NN superconducting wires which may have ss- or pp-wave pairing symmetries and develop a scattering matrix based formalism which allows us to address transport across such junctions. For N3N \ge 3, it is well known that Berry curvature terms contribute to the Josephson currents; we chart out situations where such terms can have relatively large effects. For a system of three ss- or three pp-wave superconductors, we provide analytic expressions for the Andreev bound state energies and study the Josephson currents in response to a constant voltage applied across one of the wires; we find that the integrated transconductance at zero temperature is quantized to integer multiples of 4e2/h4e^2/h, where ee is the electron charge and h=2πh = 2\pi \hbar is Planck's constant. For a sinusoidal current with frequency ω\omega applied across one of the wires in the junction, we find that Shapiro plateaus appear in the time-averaged voltage V1\langle V_1 \rangle across that wire for any rational fractional multiple (in contrast to only integer multiples in junctions of two wires) of 2eV1/(ω)2e \langle V_1 \rangle/(\hbar \omega). We also use our formalism to study junctions of two pp- and one ss-wave wires. We find that the corresponding Andreev bound state energies depend on the spin of the Bogoliubov quasiparticles; this produces a net magnetic moment in such junctions. The time variation of these magnetic moments may be controlled by an external applied voltage across the junction. We discuss experiments which may test our theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1712.03726,
  title  = {Josephson junctions of multiple superconducting wires},
  author = {Oindrila Deb and K. Sengupta and Diptiman Sen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.03726},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

21 pages, 15 figures; made some corrections and added several references; this is the published version

R2 v1 2026-06-22T23:14:03.399Z