English

Multi-terminal Josephson junctions as topological materials

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2016-04-27 v1 Superconductivity

Abstract

Topological materials and their unusual transport properties are now at the focus of modern experimental and theoretical research. Their topological properties arise from the bandstructure determined by the atomic composition of a material and as such are difficult to tune and naturally restricted to 3\leq3 dimensions. Here we demonstrate that nn-terminal Josephson junctions with conventional superconductors may provide a straightforward realization of tunable topological materials in n1n-1 dimensions. For n4n\geq 4, the Andreev subgap spectrum of the junction can accommodate Weyl singularities in the space of the n1n-1 independent superconducting phases, which play the role of bandstructure quasimomenta. The presence of these Weyl singularities enables topological transitions that are manifested experimentally as changes of the quantized transconductance between two voltage-biased leads, the quantization unit being 2e2/(π)2e^2/(\pi\hbar).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1503.06862,
  title  = {Multi-terminal Josephson junctions as topological materials},
  author = {Roman-Pascal Riwar and Manuel Houzet and Julia S. Meyer and Yuli V. Nazarov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.06862},
  year   = {2016}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:00:11.308Z