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arXiv:2411.19396 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

SNS junctions along the BCS-BEC crossover

Gautam Rai, Arman Babakhani, Ying Wang, Stephan Haas, Stefan Kettemann

Published Apr 25, 2025• 1 citation
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Abstract

We present a theory of SNS junctions, where a normal metal is in contact with two superconductors, along the crossover from the BCS to the BEC regime. Such systems can be realized experimentally by gate-controlled doping of thin film superconductors. We show that Andreev levels exist even in the BEC regime, as long as there is sufficient density of states in the normal metal. We derive the Josephson current through one-dimensional Sharvin contacts. We find that the Josephson current at zero temperature has no peak along the BCS-BEC crossover at $T=0\phantom{\rule{4.pt}{0ex}}\text{K}$ unless the order paramter $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}$ is peaked, as it is the case for superconductors with one-dimensional density of states. At finite temperature, however, we find that the Josephson current is maximal at the BCS-BEC crossover for any dimension. We identify the mechanism for this phenomenon to be a decrease in the number of Andreev levels, accompanied by an increase in excitation energy to the unoccupied levels, along the BCS-BEC crossover. This makes it less likely that these states are thermally occupied. As a consequence, the Josephson current is more strongly reduced on the BCS side of the crossover, resulting in a maximal Josephson current at the BCS-BEC crossover. Furthermore, we find that the current phase relation changes along the BCE-BEC crossover with a slope which has a pronounced maximum on the BEC-side of the BCS-BEC crossover. This maximum becomes larger and sharper as the temperature is lowered.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.111.134517

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We present a theory of SNS junctions, where a normal metal is in contact with two superconductors, along the crossover from the BCS to the BEC regime. Such systems can be realized experimentally by gate-controlled doping of thin film superconductors. We show that Andreev levels exist even in the BEC regime, as long as there is sufficient density of states in the normal metal. We derive the Josephson current through one-dimensional Sharvin contacts. We find that the Josephson current at zero temperature has no peak along the BCS-BEC crossover at T=0KT=0\phantom{\rule{4.pt}{0ex}}\text{K}T=0K unless the order paramter \ensuremathΔ\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}\ensuremathΔ is peaked, as it is the case for superconductors with one-dimensional density of states. At finite temperature, however, we find that the Josephson current is maximal at the BCS-BEC crossover for any dimension. We identify the mechanism for this phenomenon to be a decrease in the number of Andreev levels, accompanied by an increase in excitation energy to the unoccupied levels, along the BCS-BEC crossover. This makes it less likely that these states are thermally occupied. As a consequence, the Josephson current is more strongly reduced on the BCS side of the crossover, resulting in a maximal Josephson current at the BCS-BEC crossover. Furthermore, we find that the current phase relation changes along the BCE-BEC crossover with a slope which has a pronounced maximum on the BEC-side of the BCS-BEC crossover. This maximum becomes larger and sharper as the temperature is lowered.
Transport in Josephson junctions is commonly described using a simplifying assumption called the Andreev approximation, which assumes that excitations are fixed at the Fermi momentum and only Andreev reflections occur at interfaces (with no normal reflections). This approximation is appropriate for BCS-type superconductors, where the chemical potential vastly exceeds the pairing gap, but it breaks down for superconductors with low carrier density, such as topological superconductors, doped semiconductors, or superfluid quantum gases. Here, we present a generic analyticalanalyticalanalytical framework for calculating transport in Josephson junctions that lifts up the requirement of the Andreev approximation. Using this general framework, we study in detail transport in Josephson junctions across the BCS-BEC crossover, which describes the evolution from a BCS-type superconductor with loosely-paired Cooper pairs to a BEC of tighly-paired dimers. As the interaction is tuned from the BCS to the BEC regime, we find that the overall subgap current caused by multiple Andreev reflections decreases, but nonlinearities in the current-voltage characteristic called the subharmonic gap structure become more pronounced near the intermediate unitary limit, giving rise to sharp peaks and dips in the differential conductance with even negativenegativenegative conductance at specific voltages.
Physical properties of two-dimensional (2D) superconductors is an active area of long time researches in which many, even principle, questions are still open. One of them is a possibility of a smooth crossover of the system from the standard Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) regime of strongly overlapping Cooper pairs to the regime of Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC) of almost non-overlapping local pairs. The adequate to the real process description of this transition which can happen either by changing the doping or temperature would lead to a better understanding of the superconducting properties of materials. Though the crossover is not observed in one of the most important layered systems—namely, cuprate superconductors—we demonstrate that in systems with stronger electron-electron attraction it is possible. In particular, in the d-wave channel at sufficiently high doping the crossover can take place with growth of temperature two times, i.e., as BEC→BCS, and followed by reverse BCS→BEC condensation. The physical mechanisms of such transitions and possibility to detect them experimentally in real systems are discussed.
Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) superfluidity and Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) are the two extreme limits of the ground state of the paired fermion systems. We report crossover behavior from the BCS limit to the BEC limit realized by varying carrier density in a two-dimensional superconductor, electron-doped zirconium nitride chloride. The phase diagram, established by simultaneous measurements of resistivity and tunneling spectra under ionic gating, demonstrates a pseudogap phase in the low-doping regime. The ratio of the superconducting transition temperature and Fermi temperature in the low-carrier density limit is consistent with the theoretical upper bound expected in the BCS-BEC crossover regime. These results indicate that the gate-doped semiconductor provides an ideal platform for the two-dimensional BCS-BEC crossover without added complexities present in other solid-state systems.
We develop a microscopic model to describe the Josephson tunneling between two superfluid reservoirs of ultracold fermionic atoms which accounts for the dependence of the critical current on both the barrier height and the interaction strength along the crossover from the BCS to the BEC regime. Building on a previous study [F. Meier and W. Zwerger, Phys. Rev. A 64, 033610 (2001)] of weakly interacting bosons, we derive analytic results for the Josephson critical current at zero temperature for homogeneous and trapped systems at arbitrary coupling. The critical current exhibits a maximum near the unitarity limit which arises from the competition between the increasing condensate fraction and a decrease in the chemical potential along the evolution from the BCS to the BEC limit. Our results agree quantitatively with numerical simulations and recent experimental data.
We theoretically study the Josephson effect in ultracold Fermi gases, where the two sides of the Josephson junction are independently tuned to different regions of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS)-Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) crossover. Using the nonequilibrium Green's function approach combined with the tunnel Hamiltonian formalism and a mean-field approach, we evaluate the DC and AC Josephson currents throughout the entire crossover region. We calculate the DC Josephson current as a function of interaction strength by tuning both sides of the junction synchronously from the BCS to the BEC regimes, and give the asymptotic expression of the current in the deep BCS and BEC limits. We also study the AC Josephson junction through the interaction-asymmetric junction by fixing the interaction in one reservoir and tuning that of the other one. A peak of the tunneling current is found when one side is fixed in the BCS limit and the other side is tuned into the BEC regime, which corresponds to the interaction-biased Riedel peak. Our results indicate the competition between contributions of increasing pair spectral weight and decreasing chemical potential to Josephson tunneling throughout the BCS-BEC crossover, and demonstrate the realization of the Riedel peak in strong-coupling quantum gases.
The Josephson current-phase characteristics, that arise when a supercurrent flows across two fermionic superfluids separated by a potential barrier, can be controlled by varying either the interparticle coupling or the temperature. While the coupling dependence has been addressed in detail both theoretically and experimentally for an attractive Fermi gas undergoing the BCS-BEC crossover, a corresponding study of the temperature dependence of the Josephson characteristics is still lacking in this context. Here, we investigate the combined coupling and temperature dependence of the Josephson characteristics in a systematic way for a wide set of barriers, within ranges of height and width that can be experimentally explored. Our study smoothly connects the two limiting cases, of nonoverlapping composite bosons at low temperature described by the Gross-Piatevskii equation, and of strongly overlapping Cooper pairs near the critical temperature described by the Ginzburg-Landau equation. In this way, we are able to explore several interesting effects related to how the current-phase characteristics evolve along the BCS-BEC crossover as a function of temperature and of barrier shape. These effects include the coherence length outside the barrier and the pair penetration length inside the barrier (which is related to the proximity effect), as well as the temperature evolution of the Landau criterion in the limit of a vanishingly small barrier. A comparison is also presented between the available experimental data for the critical current and our theoretical results over a wide range of couplings along the BCS-BEC crossover.