Bipolar thermoelectric Josephson engine.

Thermoelectric effects in metals are typically small due to the nearly perfect particle-hole symmetry around their Fermi surface. Furthermore, thermo-phase effects and linear thermoelectricity in superconducting systems have been identified only when particle-hole symmetry is explicitly broken, since thermoelectric effects were considered impossible in pristine superconductors. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that superconducting tunnel junctions develop a very large bipolar thermoelectricity in the presence of a sizable thermal gradient thanks to spontaneous particle-hole symmetry breaking. Our junctions show Seebeck coefficients of up to ±300 μV K ^-1 , which is comparable with quantum dots and roughly 10 ⁵ times larger than the value expected for normal metals at subkelvin temperatures. Moreover, by integrating our junctions into a Josephson interferometer, we realize a bipolar thermoelectric Josephson engine generating phase-tunable electric powers of up to ~140 nW mm ^-2 . Notably, our device implements also the prototype for a persistent thermoelectric memory cell, written or erased by current injection. We expect that our findings will lead to applications in superconducting quantum technologies.
(© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.)