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Physical Review Letters

Parity-induced suppression of the Coulomb blockade of Josephson tunneling

К. А. Матвеев, M. Gisselfält, L. I. Glazman, M. Jonson, Robert I Shekhter

Published May 10, 1993• 133 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We study the Josephson current through a superconducting grain coupled by two tunnel junctions to macroscopic superconducting leads. As a result of the Coulomb blockade we predict the critical Josephson current to have a threshold behavior when the superconducting gap is suppressed below the charging energy by a magnetic field. This effect is a direct consequence of a discrimination by the superconducting ground state between odd and even number of electrons on the grain. The critical current is periodically modulated by the voltage of a gate electrostatically coupled to the grain. We find a characteristic change in this modulation at the threshold.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.70.2940

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The transport properties of a small superconductor--normal-metal--superconducting tunnel junction can be controlled by a gate electrode coupled capacitively to the central island. We evaluate the critical Josephson current Ic{\mathit{I}}_{\mathit{c}}Ic​ through such a system as a function of the gate voltage Vg{\mathit{V}}_{\mathit{g}}Vg​ taking into account parity effects in the superconductors. The dependence Ic{\mathit{I}}_{\mathit{c}}Ic​(Vg{\mathit{V}}_{\mathit{g}}Vg​) shows resonant singularities and has a qualitatively different character for \ensuremath{\Delta}EC{\mathit{E}}_{\mathit{C}}EC​ and \ensuremath{\Delta}>EC{\mathit{E}}_{\mathit{C}}EC​, \ensuremath{\Delta} being the superconducting gap and EC{\mathit{E}}_{\mathit{C}}EC​=e2{\mathit{e}}^{2}e2/2C being the charging energy. Due to the sweeping of the gate voltage, the system can be driven to states which are metastable with respect to a change of the number of electrons on the central island. Since the lifetime of the metastable states can be macroscopically large, one can observe a remarkable bistability of the Josephson current. A weak magnetic field suppresses the interference of the electrons propagating through the central electrode, and, consequently, the magnitude of the critical current.
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We study the interplay of controlled quantum-mechanical charge and phase fluctuations by measuring their influence on the supercurrent through a small superconducting grain. The grain is connected to leads by two small Josephson tunnel junctions. The phase fluctuations are controlled by the magnetic flux threading a SQUID that connects the grain to a large superconductor. The charge fluctuations are modulated by a voltage on a gate capacitor. As a function of gate voltage we observe a broadening of the Coulomb resonance of the supercurrent for decreasing phase fluctuations, in agreement with theoretical predictions.
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We present observations of charging effects for Cooper pairs in short linear arrays of small-capacitance Josephson junctions. Current-voltage characteristics show a Coulomb gap for Cooper-pair tunneling when the charging energy exceeds the Josephson coupling energy. In a double junction a zero-voltage current is observed that is modulated by a gate voltage applied to the metal island between the junctions. For longer arrays a crossover from Coulomb blockade of Cooper-pair tunneling to a supercurrent is observed when the ratio of Josephson coupling to charging energy is increased.
We develop a microscopic theory for charge transfer through a single-electron transistor containing a superconducting grain. Both tunnel current and shot noise are shown to be sensitive to the parity of the electron number on the grain. In particular, tunneling may cross over from pair channels to two distinct single-particle channels at finite voltage. The two corresponding threshold voltages are sensitive to the circuit parameters. While it is difficult to identify them from the I-V curve, they can be determined from the normalized zero-frequency noise and the finite-frequency noise spectrum.