Search

Introducing an in-plane magnetic field into Josephson junctions is of fundamental significance in exploring a variety of interesting physical phenomena. However, extra care must be paid in realistic experiments involving an in-plane magnetic field, because trivial orbital effect due to, e.g., rippled structures can inevitably be introduced, which could produce false effect confusing the expected physical phenomena. In this work, we report a diamond-shaped evolution of the critical supercurrent in an in-plane magnetic field in NbTiN weak-link Josephson junctions. Upon application of an in-plane magnetic field perpendicular to the current, the superconducting interference pattern exhibits a characteristic evolution, which manifests as a diamond block diagram featured with each node opened and stretched out in a V-shape, mimicking the suppression-recovery patterns of critical supercurrent related to the Zeeman-driven 0-pi transition. However, the effect of Zeeman splitting plays a negligible role due to the relatively small magnetic field involved in our experiment. Therefore, we explore the trivial orbital effect of rippled structures and further take into account non-uniform current distributions pertaining in our junctions. We find that the ripples in combination with specific current distributions can give rise to a similar evolution pattern as the experimental observations. Our results serve as a caution that the combined effect of rippled structures and non-homogeneous current distributions should be taken seriously for experiments subjected by in-plane magnetic fields., Comment: 15pages,13 figures

Coherence and tunneling play central roles in quantum phenomena. In a tunneling event, the time that a particle spends inside the barrier has been fiercely debated. This problem becomes more complex when tunneling repeatedly occurs back and forth, and when involving many particles. Here we report the measurement of the coherence time of various charge states tunneling in a nanowire-based tunable Josephson junction; including single charges, multiple charges, and Cooper pairs. We studied all the charge tunneling processes using Landau-Zener-St\"uckelberg-Majorana (LZSM) interferometry, and observed high-quality interference patterns. In particular, the coherence time of the charge states was extracted from the interference fringes in Fourier space. In addition, our measurements show the break-up of Cooper pairs, from a macroscopic quantum coherent state to individual particle states. Besides the fundamental research interest, our results also establish LZSM interferometry as a powerful technique to explore the coherence time of charges in hybrid devices., Comment: 21+15 pages, 4+9 figures

Negative differential conductance (NDC) manifests as a significant characteristic of various underlying physics and transport processes in hybrid superconducting devices. In this work, we report the observation of gate-tunable NDC outside the superconducting energy gap on two types of hybrid semiconductor-superconductor devices, i.e., normal metal-superconducting nanowire-normal metal and normal metal-superconducting nanowire-superconductor devices. Specifically, we study the dependence of the NDCs on back-gate voltage and magnetic field. When the back-gate voltage decreases, these NDCs weaken and evolve into positive differential conductance dips; and meanwhile they move away from the superconducting gap towards high bias voltage, and disappear eventually. In addition, with the increase of magnetic field, the NDCs/dips follow the evolution of the superconducting gap, and disappear when the gap closes. We interpret these observations and reach a good agreement by combining the Blonder-Tinkham-Klapwijk (BTK) model and the critical supercurrent effect in the nanowire, which we call the BTK-supercurrent model. Our results provide an in-depth understanding of the tunneling transport in hybrid semiconductor-superconductor devices., Comment: 15+6 pages, 4+6 figures