English

Topological supercurrents interaction and fluctuations in the multiterminal Josephson effect

Superconductivity 2019-04-03 v2 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

We study the Josephson effect in the multiterminal junction of topological superconductors. We use the symmetry-constrained scattering matrix approach to derive band dispersions of emergent sub-gap Andreev bound states in a multidimensional parameter space of superconducting phase differences. We find distinct topologically protected band crossings that serve as monopoles of finite Berry curvature. Particularly, in a four-terminal junction the admixture of 2π2\pi and 4π4\pi periodic levels leads to the appearance of finite energy Majorana-Weyl nodes. This topological regime in the junction can be characterized by a quantized nonlocal conductance that measures the Chern number of the corresponding bands. In addition, we calculate current-phase relations, variance, and cross-correlations of topological supercurrents in multiterminal contacts and discuss the universality of these transport characteristics. At the technical level these results are obtained by integrating over the group of a circular ensemble that describes the scattering matrix of the junction. We briefly discuss our results in the context of observed fluctuations of the gate dependence of the critical current in topological planar Josephson junctions and comment on the possibility of parity measurements from the switching current distributions in multiterminal Majorana junctions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1812.09767,
  title  = {Topological supercurrents interaction and fluctuations in the multiterminal Josephson effect},
  author = {Hong-Yi Xie and Alex Levchenko},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.09767},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

8+ pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T06:55:01.579Z