0-$\pi$ phase-controllable $thermal$ Josephson junction

Abstract

Two superconductors coupled by a weak link support an equilibrium Josephson electrical current which depends on the phase difference $\phi$ between the superconducting condensates [1]. Yet, when a temperature gradient is imposed across the junction, the Josephson effect manifests itself through a coherent component of the heat current that flows oppositely to the thermal gradient for $\phi <\pi /2$ [2-4]. The direction of both the Josephson charge and heat currents can be inverted by adding a $\pi$ shift to $\phi$. In the static electrical case, this effect was obtained in a few systems, e.g. via a ferromagnetic coupling [5,6] or a non-equilibrium distribution in the weak link [7]. These structures opened new possibilities for superconducting quantum logic [6,8] and ultralow power superconducting computers [9]. Here, we report the first experimental realization of a thermal Josephson junction whose phase bias can be controlled from $0$ to $\pi$. This is obtained thanks to a superconducting quantum interferometer that allows to fully control the direction of the coherent energy transfer through the junction [10]. This possibility, joined to the completely superconducting nature of our system, provides temperature modulations with unprecedented amplitude of $\sim$ 100 mK and transfer coefficients exceeding 1 K per flux quantum at 25 mK. Then, this quantum structure represents a fundamental step towards the realization of caloritronic logic components, such as thermal transistors, switches and memory devices [10,11]. These elements, combined with heat interferometers [3,4,12] and diodes [13,14], would complete the thermal conversion of the most important phase-coherent electronic devices and benefit cryogenic microcircuits requiring energy management, such as quantum computing architectures and radiation sensors.

10 pages, 9 color figures

References in corpus (7)

• Single-mode heat conduction by photons
• The Josephson heat interferometer
• Rectification of electronic heat current by a hybrid thermal diode
• Recombination limited energy relaxation in a BCS superconductor
• Phase-controlled superconducting heat-flux quantum modulator
• Manipulation and Generation of Supercurrent in Out-of-Equilibrium Josephson Tunnel Nanojunctions
• Cooling electrons from 1 K to 400 mK with V-based nanorefrigerators

Cited by in corpus (28)

• Metallic supercurrent field-effect transistor
• Towards phase-coherent caloritronics in superconducting circuits
• Josephson thermal memory
• Minimal excitation states for heat transport in driven quantum Hall systems
• Negative differential thermal conductance and heat amplification in a nonequilibrium triangle-coupled spin-boson system at strong coupling
• Phase-dependent heat and charge transport through superconductor-quantum dot hybrids
• A superconducting nonlinear thermoelectric heat engine
• Phase-coherent solitonic Josephson heat oscillator
• Coherent Josephson thermodynamic cycles
• Phase-coherent heat circulator based on multi-terminal Josephson junctions
• Solitonic Josephson thermal transport
• Phase-tunable Josephson thermal router
• Phase-coherent caloritronics with ordinary and topological Josephson junctions
• Hysteretic superconducting heat-flux quantum modulator
• Thermal superconducting quantum interference proximity transistor
• Hong-Ou-Mandel heat noise in the quantum Hall regime
• Thermal signature of Majorana fermions in Josephson junction
• Optimal quantum parametric feedback cooling
• Phase-dependent heat transport in Josephson junctions with p-wave superconductors and superfluids
• Superconductor-quantum dot hybrid coolers
• ${\theta }_0$ thermal Josephson junction
• Heat-transfer fingerprint of Josephson breathers
• Thermal flux-flow regime in long Josephson tunnel junctions
• Heat hunting in freezer: Direct measurement of quasiparticle diffusion in superconducting nanowire
• Phase-dependent transport in thermally-driven superconducting single-electron transistors
• High-performance Andreev interferometer-based electronic coolers
• Phase-controlled heat modulation with Aharonov-Bohm interferometers
• Excess quasiparticles and their dynamics in the presence of subgap states