Quasiparticle trapping at vortices producing Josephson supercurrent enhancement

Abstract

The Josephson junction of a strong spin-orbit material under a magnetic field is a promising Majorana fermion candidate. Supercurrent enhancement by a magnetic field has been observed in the InAs nanowire Josephson junctions and assigned to a topological transition. In this work we observe a similar phenomenon but discuss the non-topological origin by considering trapping of quasiparticles by vortices that penetrate the superconductor under a finite magnetic field. This assignment is supported by the observed hysteresis of the switching current when sweeping up and down the magnetic field. Our experiment shows the importance of quasiparticles in superconducting devices with a magnetic field, which can provide important insights for the design of quantum qubits using superconductors.

10 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (10)

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Evidence for $\pi$-shifted Cooper quartets and few-mode transport in PbTe nanowire three-terminal Josephson junctions
• Applications of Superconductor-Normal Metal Interfaces
• Long-time soliton dynamics via a coarse-grained space-time method
• Ubiquitous missing first Shapiro step in Al-InSb nanosheet Josephson junctions