Anomalous Josephson effect and rectification in junctions between Floquet topological superconductors

TL;DR

This paper investigates the anomalous Josephson effect and rectification phenomena in junctions between Floquet topological superconductors, revealing how periodic driving influences Majorana modes and induces diode effects.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze the ground state in driven systems and demonstrates the emergence of anomalous currents and Josephson diode effects in Floquet topological superconductor junctions.

Findings

Presence of anomalous current in driven Kitaev chain junctions

Observation of nonequilibrium Josephson diode effect

Anomalous currents persist under adiabatic driving

Abstract

Periodically driven Kitaev chains are known to exhibit novel Floquet Majorana fermions and anomalous Floquet end modes. The fact that `quasienergy in Floquet systems is periodic' poses a difficulty in defining the ground state in periodically driven systems. To overcome this problem, we start with the ground state of the undriven Kitaev chain and gradually switch on the periodic driving in chemical potential over a timescale $\tau$. The extent to which the single particle eigenstates of the undriven system get distributed among the Floquet states upon driving can be characterized by inverse participation ratio. In a Josephson junction between two periodically driven Kitaev chains not differing in phase of the pair potentials but differing in phases of the driving potentials, a net average current flows from one superconductor to the other. We term such a current anomalous current. Further, we study current phase relation in junctions between two periodically driven superconductors and find that the system exhibits nonequilibrium Josephson diode effect. The Floquet Majorana end modes and anomalous Floquet end modes whenever present contribute significantly to the anomalous current and the diode effect. Further, the anomalous current and the nonequilibrium Josephson diode effect survive when the periodic driving is adiabatically switched on.