We uncover current-bias characteristics of superfluid-normal state junctions with weakly-interacting Bose gases. It is shown that in the presence of a chemical potential bias the characteristics can strongly be asymmetric for origin. The salient feature that is absent in the fermionic counterpart arises from a tunneling process associated with a condensate and a bosonic Andreev reflection process. It turns out that such processes are intrinsically nonlinear and therefore do not obey Ohm's law even at a low bias. In addition, the remaining processes are found to obey Ohm's law and become dominant for transport driven by a temperature bias.
We uncover current-bias characteristics of superfluid-normal state junctions with weakly-interacting Bose gases. It is shown that in the presence of a chemical potential bias the characteristics can strongly be asymmetric for origin. The salient feature that is absent in the fermionic counterpart arises from a tunneling process associated with a condensate and a bosonic Andreev reflection process. It turns out that such processes are intrinsically nonlinear and therefore do not obey Ohm's law even at a low bias. In addition, the remaining processes are found to obey Ohm's law and become dominant for transport driven by a temperature bias.
Point contacts provide simple connections between macroscopic particle reservoirs. In electric circuits, strong links between metals, semiconductors, or superconductors have applications for fundamental condensed-matter physics as well as quantum information processing. However, for complex, strongly correlated materials, links have been largely restricted to weak tunnel junctions. We studied resonantly interacting Fermi gases connected by a tunable, ballistic quantum point contact, finding a nonlinear current-bias relation. At low temperature, our observations agree quantitatively with a theoretical model in which the current originates from multiple Andreev reflections. In a wide contact geometry, the competition between superfluidity and thermally activated transport leads to a conductance minimum. Our system offers a controllable platform for the study of mesoscopic devices based on strongly interacting matter.
Point contacts provide simple connections between macroscopic particle reservoirs. In electric circuits, strong links between metals, semiconductors, or superconductors have applications for fundamental condensed-matter physics as well as quantum information processing. However, for complex, strongly correlated materials, links have been largely restricted to weak tunnel junctions. We studied resonantly interacting Fermi gases connected by a tunable, ballistic quantum point contact, finding a nonlinear current-bias relation. At low temperature, our observations agree quantitatively with a theoretical model in which the current originates from multiple Andreev reflections. In a wide contact geometry, the competition between superfluidity and thermally activated transport leads to a conductance minimum. Our system offers a controllable platform for the study of mesoscopic devices based on strongly interacting matter.
Atomtronics experiments with ultracold atomic gases allow us to explore quantum transport phenomena of a weakly-interacting Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Here, we focus on two-terminal transport of such a BEC in the vicinity of zero temperature. By using the tunnel Hamiltonian and Bogoliubov theory, we obtain a DC Josephson current expression in the BEC and apply it to experimentally relevant situations such as quantum point contact and planar junction. Due to the absence of Andreev bound states but the presence of couplings associated with condensation elements, a current-phase relation in the BEC is found to be different from one in an s-wave superconductor. In addition, it turns out that the DC Josephson current in the BEC depends on the sign of tunneling elements, which allows to realize the so-called $\ensuremath{\pi}$ junction by using techniques of artificial gauge fields.
Transport in strongly interacting Fermi gases provides a window into the nonequilibrium behavior of strongly correlated fermions. In particular, the interface between a strongly polarized normal gas and a weakly polarized superfluid at finite temperature presents a model for understanding transport at normal-superfluid and normal-superconductor interfaces. An excess of polarization in the normal phase or a deficit of polarization in the superfluid brings the system out of equilibrium, leading to transport currents across the interface. We implement a phenomenological mean-field model of the unitary Fermi gas, and investigate the transport of spin and mass under nonequilibrium conditions. We consider independently prepared normal and superfluid regions brought into contact, and calculate the instantaneous spin and mass currents across the normal-superfluid (NS) interface. For an unpolarized superfluid, we find that spin current is suppressed below a threshold value in the driving chemical potential differences, while the threshold nearly vanishes for a critically polarized superfluid. The mass current can exhibit a threshold in cases where Andreev reflection vanishes, while in general Andreev reflection prevents the occurrence of a threshold in the mass current. Our results provide guidance to future experiments aiming to characterize spin and mass transport across NS interfaces.
We investigate the transport of a Fermi gas with unitarity-limited interactions across the superfluid phase transition, probing its response to a direct current (dc) drive through a tunnel junction. As the superfluid critical temperature is crossed from below, we observe the evolution from a highly nonlinear to an Ohmic conduction characteristic, associated with the critical breakdown of the Josephson dc current induced by pair condensate depletion. Moreover, we reveal a large and dominant anomalous contribution to resistive currents, which reaches its maximum at the lowest attained temperature, fostered by the tunnel coupling between the condensate and phononic Bogoliubov-Anderson excitations. Increasing the temperature, while the zeroing of supercurrents marks the transition to the normal phase, the conductance drops considerably but remains much larger than that of a normal, uncorrelated Fermi gas tunneling through the same junction. We attribute such enhanced transport to incoherent tunneling of sound modes, which remain weakly damped in the collisional hydrodynamic fluid of unpaired fermions at unitarity.
Abstract It is found that Andreev reflection provides a deterministic teleportation process at an ideal normal-superconductor interface, making it behave like an information mirror. However, it is challenging to control the Andreev reflection in a spatially-separated junction due to the mode mixing at the interface. We theoretically propose the laser-induced Andreev reflection between two-component Fermi superfluid and normal states without mode mixing via spatially-uniform Rabi couplings. By analyzing the tunneling current up to the fourth order, we find that the Andreev current exhibits unconventional non-Ohmic transport at zero temperature. The Andreev current gives the only contribution in the synthetic junction system at zero detunings regardless of the ratio of the chemical potential bias to the superfluid gap, which is in sharp contrast to that in conventional junctions. Our result may give a potential impact on theoretical and experimental study of quantum many-body phenomena, and also pave a way for understanding the black hole information paradox through the Andreev reflection as a quantum-information mirror.