Supercurrent dephasing by electron-electron interactions

Abstract

We demonstrate that in sufficiently long diffusive superconducting-normal-superconducting ($SNS$) junctions dc Josephson current is exponentially suppressed by electron-electron interactions down to zero temperature. This suppression is caused by the effect of {\it Cooper pair dephasing} which occurs in the normal metal and defines a new fundamental length scale $L_{\phi }$ in the problem. Provided the temperature length exceeds $L_{\phi }$ this dephasing length can be conveniently extracted from equilibrium measurements of the Josephson current.

11 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Quantum decoherence of interacting electrons in arrays of quantum dots and diffusive conductors
• Dephasing of Cooper pairs and subgap electron transport in superconducting hybrids