Observation of a controllable PI-junction in a 3-terminal Josephson device
Abstract
Recently Baselmans et al. [Nature, 397, 43 (1999)] showed that the direction of the supercurrent in a superconductor/normal/superconductor Josephson junction can be reversed by applying, perpendicularly to the supercurrent, a sufficiently large control current between two normal reservoirs. The novel behavior of their 4-terminal device (called a controllable PI-junction) arises from the nonequilibrium electron energy distribution established in the normal wire between the two superconductors. We have observed a similar supercurrent reversal in a 3-terminal device, where the control current passes from a single normal reservoir into the two superconductors. We show theoretically that this behavior, although intuitively less obvious, arises from the same nonequilibrium physics present in the 4-terminal device. Moreover, we argue that the amplitude of the PI-state critical current should be at least as large in the 3-terminal device as in a comparable 4-terminal device.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0206026,
title = {Observation of a controllable PI-junction in a 3-terminal Josephson device},
author = {Jian Huang and F. Pierre and Tero T. Heikkila and Frank K. Wilhelm and Norman O. Birge},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0206026},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Physical Review B Rapid Communications