Mesoscopic fluctuations in superconductor-topological insulator Josephson junctions

TL;DR

This paper analyzes mesoscopic fluctuations in the supercurrent of a topological insulator-based Josephson junction, revealing how these fluctuations depend on coupling, energy scales, and magnetic field, with implications for experimental measurements.

Contribution

It provides an analytical description of supercurrent fluctuations in topological insulator Josephson junctions considering strong proximity effects and magnetic fields, using a replica nonlinear sigma-model approach.

Findings

Supercurrent fluctuations depend on coupling strength, Thouless energy, and pair-breaking energy.

Density of states fluctuations can be probed by scanning techniques.

Analytical results are derived for the fluctuation magnitude and functional form.

Abstract

We study mesoscopic fluctuations in the supercurrent of a Josephson junction consisting of a topological insulator microbridge between two conventional superconductors. In the model, we account for the strong proximity effect when superconductors induce a gap in the spectrum of surface states as well as a magnetic field piercing the junction area that causes depairing and gap filling. The overall magnitude and functional form of the Josephson current fluctuations are determined analytically, and found to sensitively depend on the coupling strength to surface states, Thouless energy, and pair-breaking energy scales in the problem. We also study the density of states that can be measured by scanning probes. Technically, mesoscopic fluctuations on top of the mean field description of the proximity effect in the topological region are described by a field theory approach, the replica nonlinear $\sigma$-model in the class-D of the extended symmetry classification.