All silicon Josephson junctions

TL;DR

This paper reports the development of laser-doped all-silicon Josephson junctions with highly transparent interfaces, enabling detailed study of their properties and fundamental parameters for silicon-based superconducting electronics.

Contribution

It introduces a method to create all-silicon superconducting junctions with low-resistance interfaces and characterizes their transport properties and fundamental parameters.

Findings

Reduced interface resistance by an order of magnitude.

Demonstrated long-range proximity effect in all-silicon SNS junctions.

Estimated key parameters like Fermi velocity and coherence length.

Abstract

We have realised laser-doped all-silicon superconducting (S)/ normal metal (N) bilayers of tunable thickness and dopant concentration. We observed a strong reduction of the bilayers critical temperature when increasing the normal metal thickness, a signature of the highly transparent S/N interface associated to the epitaxial sharp laser doping profile. We extracted the interface resistance by fitting with the linearised Usadel equations, demonstrating a reduction of one order of magnitude from previous superconductor/doped Si interfaces. In this well controlled crystalline system we exploited the low resistance S/N interfaces to elaborate all-silicon lateral SNS Josephson junctions with long range proximity effect. Their dc transport properties, such as the critical and retrapping currents, could be well understood in the diffusive regime. Furthermore, this work lead to the estimation of important parameters in ultra-doped superconducting Si, such as the Fermi velocity, the coherence length, or the electron-phonon coupling constant, fundamental to conceive an all-silicon superconducting electronics.