English

Transport across junctions of pseudospin-one fermions

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2019-08-28 v1 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

We study transport across ballistic junctions of materials which host pseudospin-one fermions as emergent low-energy quasiparticles. The effective low-energy Hamiltonians of such fermions are described by integer spin Weyl models. We show that current conservation in such integer spin-ss Weyl systems requires continuity across a boundary of only 2s2s (out of 2s+12s+1) components of the wave function. Using the current conservation conditions, we study the transport between normal metal-barrier-normal metal (NBN) and normal metal-barrier-superconductor (NBS) junctions of such systems in the presence of an applied voltage eVeV. We show that for a specific value of the barrier potential U0U_0, such NBN junctions act as perfect collimators; any quasiparticle which is incident on the barrier with a non-zero angle of incidence is reflected back with unit probability for any barrier width dd. We discover an interesting symmetry of this system, namely, the conductance is invariant under U02(μL±eV)U0U_0 \to 2(\mu_L \pm eV)-U_0, where μL\mu_L is the chemical potential and the +(-) sign corresponds to particle (hole) mediated transport. For NBS junctions with a proximity-induced ss-wave pairing potential, which also display such a collimation, we chart out the properties of the subgap tunneling conductance GG as a function of the barrier strength and applied voltage. We point out the effect of the collimation on the subgap tunneling conductance of these NBS junctions and discuss experiments which can test our theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.04175,
  title  = {Transport across junctions of pseudospin-one fermions},
  author = {Sourav Nandy and K. Sengupta and Diptiman Sen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.04175},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

v1; 13 pages, 8 figs