Josephson effect between superconducting nanograins with discrete energy levels

Abstract

We investigate the Josephson effect between two coupled superconductors, coupled by the tunneling of pairs of electrons, in the regime that their energy level spacing is comparable to the bulk superconducting gap, but neglecting any charging effects. In this regime, BCS theory is not valid, and the notion of a superconducting order parameter with a well-defined phase is inapplicable. Using the density matrix renormalization group, we calculate the ground state of the two coupled superconductors and extract the Josephson energy. The Josephson energy is found to display a reentrant behavior (decrease followed by increase) as a function of increasing level spacing. For weak Josephson coupling, a tight-binding approximation is introduced, which illustrates the physical mechanism underlying this reentrance in a transparent way. The DMRG method is also applied to two strongly coupled superconductors and allows a detailed examination of the limits of validity of the tight-binding model.

References in corpus (9)

• The density-matrix renormalization group
• Coherent control of macroscopic quantum states in a single-Cooper-pair box
• High-temperature superfluidity of fermionic atoms in optical lattices
• Spectroscopy of discrete energy levels in ultrasmall metallic grains
• A Density Matrix Renormalization Group Study of Ultrasmall Superconducting Grains
• Exact Study of the Effect of Level Statistics in Ultrasmall Superconducting Grains
• The Crossover from the Bulk to the Few-Electron limit in Ultrasmall Metallic Grains
• Thermodynamic properties of a small superconducting grain
• Integrable coupling in a model for Josephson tunneling between non-identical BCS systems

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• Well-defined quasiparticles in interacting metallic grains
• Generalized transmon Hamiltonian for Andreev spin qubits
• Relative Phase and Josephson Dynamics between Weakly Coupled Richardson Models
• Qubit based on spin-singlet Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states
• Matrix-product state approach to the generalized nuclear pairing Hamiltonian