Supercurrent blockade in Josephson junctions with a Majorana wire

Alex Zazunov; Reinhold Egger

doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.85.104514

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Supercurrent blockade in Josephson junctions with a Majorana wire

Alex Zazunov, Reinhold Egger

DOI 10.1103/PhysRevB.85.104514 · Physical Review B

T1

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Abstract

We study the Josephson effect for a topologically nontrivial superconducting (TS) wire with Majorana fermion end states and tunnel-coupled to s-wave BCS superconducting (S) electrodes. In an S-TS junction, no supercurrent flow is possible under fairly general conditions. For the S-TS-S junction, bulk TS quasiparticles must be accessible to have a Josephson effect. In the noninteracting case, we derive the exact current-phase relation (CPR) and find π-periodic behavior with negative critical current for weak tunnel couplings. Charging effects then cause the anomalous CPR I(ϕ)=Iccosϕ, where the parity-sensitive critical current Ic provides a signature for Majorana states.

Source-reported materials — not catalogue approval

Formula	Reported Tc (K)	Pressure (GPa)	Type
Bi2Se3 Archive — visibility unverified Source-occurrence policy only; no material identity or catalogue acceptance is inferred from the formula.	—	Pressure not reported	unknown
HgTe/CdTe Archive — visibility unverified Source-occurrence policy only; no material identity or catalogue acceptance is inferred from the formula.	—	Pressure not reported	unknown