Multiterminal Josephson junctions with tunable topological properties

TL;DR

This paper explores how four-terminal Josephson junctions with square and graphene lattices can exhibit tunable topological phases through phase differences and gating potentials, revealing transitions between trivial and non-trivial states.

Contribution

It demonstrates the control of topological properties in multiterminal Josephson junctions via gating, extending understanding of topological Andreev bound states in complex lattice structures.

Findings

Gating potential induces topological phase transitions in four-terminal Josephson junctions.

Topological Andreev bound states can be tuned by phase differences and gating.

Similar physics observed in quantum-dot based multiterminal junctions with varying gating strengths.

Abstract

Since the discovery of the Andreev reflection process at normal-metal/superconductor junctions and the corresponding Andreev bound states in superconductor/normal-metal/superconductor junctions, various multiterminal Josephson junctions have been studied to explore many exotic phases of quantum matter, where the formation of Andreev bound states in the normal region account for dissipationless supercurrent and play a central role in determining exotic properties. Recently, an intriguing aspect of the multiterminal Josephson junctions has been proposed to study the topological properties, wherein the Andreev bound states acquire topological characteristics upon tuning the phase differences of superconducting terminals. In this work, we investigate topologically non-trivial phases in four-terminal Josephson junctions based on square and graphene lattices. Additionally, we apply a gating potential that smoothly drives the Andreev bound states from a topologically non-trivial state to a trivial state. Furthermore, we observe that the gating potential in our setup produces the similar physics of the topological Andreev bound states of the double (single) quantum-dot multiterminal Josephson junctions when the gating potential is small (large) compared to the superconducting gap.