Hanbury Brown and Twiss Correlations of Cooper Pairs in Helical Liquids

TL;DR

This paper proposes an HBT experiment with Cooper pairs in quantum spin Hall insulators, revealing that emitted pairs exhibit fermionic correlations contrary to their bosonic nature, challenging previous assumptions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel HBT setup for Cooper pairs in helical liquids, showing their fermionic correlation behavior and highlighting differences from prior experiments.

Findings

Cooper pairs show negative cross correlations, indicating fermionic behavior.

The setup differs from previous works, affecting the observed correlations.

Results challenge the assumption of bosonic nature of Cooper pairs in this context.

Abstract

We propose a Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) experiment of Cooper pairs on the edge channels of quantum spin Hall insulators. The helical edge channels provide a well defined beam of Cooper pairs and perfect Andreev reflections from superconductors. Surprisingly, the Cooper pairs do not bear a bosonic nature at all once emitted from the superconductor, and the cross correlation is strongly negative as for free electrons. This result is counter-intuitive, and seemingly contradictory to the previous theoretical and recent experimental results. We will point out that our setup is much closer in spirit to the original HBT experiment (and different) than those in previous works. We will argue that these differences affect significantly the results.