Twisted van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures offer a unique platform for engineering the efficient Josephson coupling between cuprate thin crystals harboring the nodal superconducting order parameter. Preparing vdW heterostructures-based Josephson junction comprising stacked cuprates requires maintaining an ordered interface with preserved surface superconductivity. Here, we report the preparation of the Josephson junction out of the stacked Bi2Sr2CuCa2O8+d crystals using the cryogenic dry transfer technique and encapsulating the junction with an insulating layer, that protects the interface during the electrical contacts evaporation at the 10-6 mbar base pressure. We find that the Josephson critical current Ic has a maximum at low twist angles, comparable to that of the bulk intrinsic Josephson junctions, and is reduced by two orders of magnitude at twist angles close to 45{\deg}. The reduction of Ic occurs due to a mismatch between superconducting d-wave order parameters, which suppresses the direct Cooper pair tunneling.
@article{arxiv.2303.16029,
title = {Twisted cuprate van der Waals heterostructures with controlled Josephson coupling},
author = {Mickey Martini and Yejin Lee and Tommaso Confalone and Sanaz Shokri and Christian N. Saggau and Daniel Wolf and Genda Gu and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi and Domenico Montemurro and Valerii M. Vinokur and Kornelius Nielsch and Nicola Poccia},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.16029},
year = {2024}
}