Supercurrent blockade in Josephson junctions with a Majorana wire

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 $I(\phi )=I_c\cos \phi$, where the parity-sensitive critical current I_c provides a signature for Majorana states.

6 pages, 2 figures, to appear in PRB

References in corpus (5)

• Non-Abelian Anyons and Topological Quantum Computation
• Superconducting proximity effect and Majorana fermions at the surface of a topological insulator
• Majorana Fermions and a Topological Phase Transition in Semiconductor-Superconductor Heterostructures
• Topological Phases of Noncentrosymmetric Superconductors: Edge States, Majorana Fermions, and the Non-Abelian Statistics
• Observing Majorana Bound States in p-wave Superconductors Using Noise Measurements in Tunneling Experiments

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Observation of Majorana Fermions in a Nb-InSb Nanowire-Nb Hybrid Quantum Device
• Josephson effect in multiterminal topological junctions
• Enhanced current noise correlations in a Coulomb-Majorana device
• Transport through Majorana nanowires attached to normal leads
• $6\pi$ Josephson effect in Majorana box devices