Hanbury Brown and Twiss Correlations of Cooper Pairs in Helical Liquids
arXiv:1002.3144 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.89.045137
Abstract
We propose a Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) experiment of Cooper pairs on the edge channels of quantum spin Hall insulators. The helical edge channels provide a well defined beam of Cooper pairs and perfect Andreev reflections from superconductors. Surprisingly, the Cooper pairs do not bear a bosonic nature at all once emitted from the superconductor, and the cross correlation is strongly negative as for free electrons. This result is counter-intuitive, and seemingly contradictory to the previous theoretical and recent experimental results. We will point out that our setup is much closer in spirit to the original HBT experiment (and different) than those in previous works. We will argue that these differences affect significantly the results.
Originally submitted to PRL; some unpredicted personal events delayed unusually long its publication in journal; now to appear in PRB
References in corpus (11)
- Quantum Spin Hall Effect and Topological Phase Transition in HgTe Quantum Wells
- Quantum Spin Hall Insulator State in HgTe Quantum Wells
- Superconducting proximity effect and Majorana fermions at the surface of a topological insulator
- New directions in the pursuit of Majorana fermions in solid state systems
- Josephson Current and Noise at a Superconductor-Quantum Spin Hall Insulator-Superconductor Junction
- Quantum Spin Hall Effect in Inverted Type II Semiconductors
- Camparison of the Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect for bosons and fermions
- Carbon Nanotubes as Cooper Pair Beam Splitters
- Corner Junction as a Probe of Helical Edge States
- Tunneling between edge states in a quantum spin Hall system
- Cooper-Pair Injection into Quantum Spin Hall Insulators