Effect of impurities on the Josephson current through helical metals: Exploiting a neutrino paradigm

Abstract

In this letter we study the effect of time-reversal symmetric impurities on the Josephson supercurrent through two dimensional helical metals such as on topological insulator surface state. We show that contrary to the usual superconducting-normal metal-superconducting junctions, the suppression of supercurrent in superconducting-helical metal-superconducting junction is mainly due to fluctuations of impurities in the junctions. Our results, which is a condensed matter realization of a part of the MSW effect for neutrinos, shows that the relationship between normal state conductance and critical current of Josephson junctions is significantly modified for Josephson junctions on the surface of topological insulators. We also study the temperature-dependence of supercurrent and present a two fluid model which can explain some of recent experimental results in Josephson junctions on the edge of topological insulators.

8 pages (including supplementary materials)

References in corpus (7)

• Superconducting proximity effect and Majorana fermions at the surface of a topological insulator
• Topological Field Theory of Time-Reversal Invariant Insulators
• Epitaxial growth of topological insulator Bi2Se3 film on Si(111) with atomically sharp interface
• Surface versus bulk state in topological insulator Bi2Se3 under environmental disorder
• Absence of a Proximity Effect in a Topological Insulator on a Cuprate Superconductor: Bi2Se3/Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8
• Current-phase relation for Josephson effect through helical metal
• Theory of the random potential and conductivity at the surface of a topological insulator

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Anomalous low-temperature enhancement of supercurrent in topological-insulator nanoribbon Josephson junctions: evidence for low-energy Andreev bound states
• Josephson effect in a Weyl SNS junction
• Quantum interference in topological insulator Josephson junctions
• Signature of Anomalous Andreev bound states in magnetic Josephson junction of noncentrosymmetric superconductor on a topological insulator
• Quasiparticle interference and resonant states in normal and superconducting line nodal semimetals
• Unified scattering approach to Josephson current and thermal noise in BCS and topological superconducting junctions
• Tunable effective length of fractional Josephson junctions