English

Josephson effect in multiterminal topological junctions

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2017-07-28 v2

Abstract

We study the Josephson effect in a trijunction formed by two topological superconductor (TS) wires and a conventional ss-wave superconductor. Using a boundary Green's function formalism, analytical results for the current-phase relation are obtained in various limiting cases by modeling the TS wires via the low-energy limit of a Kitaev chain. We show that Josephson transport critically depends on the spin canting angle θ\theta between the boundary spin polarizations of the TS wires, which in turn suggests that the spin structure of Majorana states can be accessed through supercurrent measurements. We also extend the boundary Green's function approach to a more microscopic spinful wire model and thereby compute the dependence of θ\theta on experimentally accessible parameters such as the Zeeman field and/or the chemical potential. Furthermore, we show that the equilibrium current-phase relation between both TS wires exhibits a robust 4π4\pi-periodicity since the conventional superconducting lead effectively locks the fermion parity of the trijunction.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.05332,
  title  = {Josephson effect in multiterminal topological junctions},
  author = {A. Zazunov and R. Egger and M. Alvarado and A. Levy Yeyati},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.05332},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

11 pages, 9 figures, final version (minor changes) to appear in PRB

R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:21:05.293Z