Unidirectional superconductivity and superconducting diode effect induced by dissipation

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to achieve unidirectional superconductivity and a superconducting diode effect in bilayer superconductors through dissipation and nonequilibrium steady states, overcoming equilibrium constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a dissipation-driven setup to realize unidirectional superconductivity and the diode effect in atomically thin bilayer superconductors.

Findings

Stable steady states occur only under in-plane supercurrent with high out-of-plane electric field.

The system achieves up to 100% efficiency in the superconducting diode effect.

Dissipation enables superconductivity in nonequilibrium conditions.

Abstract

A general principle of condensed matter physics prohibits the electric current in equilibrium. This prevents a zero-resistance state realized solely under a finite electric current, namely unidirectional superconductivity. In this paper, we propose a setup to realize the unidirectional superconductivity as a nonequilibrium steady state. We focus on the in-plane transport of atomically thin bilayer superconductors lacking the in-plane inversion symmetry and introduce dissipation by applying the out-of-plane electric field and current. By analyzing the time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau equations, we show that locally stable steady-state solutions appear only under the in-plane supercurrent when the out-of-plane electric field exceeds a threshold value. Our system also realizes the dissipation-induced superconducting diode effect up to 100% efficiency by purely electric means.