Friday, August 26, 2011

Michael Gershenson: Magnetic-field driven phase transitions in unconventional Josephson arrays

Michael started off by reminding us of the Bosonic model of superconductor-insulator transition (SIT).

In this model as applied to Josephson Junction arrays, there is charge-flux duality. Can be described by a Hamiltonian with Josephson couplings between scing island and charging energies for the islands.

In the regime where Ec
There are a number of possible complications in the simple arrays including random charge, and Josephson energies, and flux noise.

They have endeavored to overcome these issues by making JJ arrays with a large number of nearest-neighbor islands. These are arrays where there is a supercell of many tightly connected neighbors. This supercell is connected to its neighboring supercells, by cells that have less interconnects. With these array they can explore of a wide range of JJ parameters and an effective Ej/Ec created which is enhanced over the bare value by factor of N^2.

Michael 1st presented data for array without ground planes and then for arrays conducting ground plane. They found multiple SIT (due to commensurate effects) over a wide range of critical resistances R ~ 3-20 k were observed. "Metallic" phases with very low (typically < 100 mK) characteristic energies were found.

SIT observed at low “critical” Rcr ~ few ohms resemble the “dirty boson” SIT however the duality is lacking for the transitions observed at larger Rcr . On the “insulating” side of the SIT, the R(T) dependences can be fitted with the Arrhenius law R(T)~exp(T0/T), where kBT0 is close to the “Coulomb” gap 2eV* (V* is the offset voltage across the whole array). Michael speculated that this may be a signature of some collective process and/or macroscopic inhomogeneity. The threshold for quasiparticle generation at high bias currents is surprisingly universal for samples with vastly different zero-bias resistances and that this power scales with the array area.

Blogged by Peter Armitage

1 comment:

  1. Important observation presented in this talk is that macroscopically superconducting state can exist in arrays with individual resistance up to MOhm range (due to large factor N increasing effective Josephson energy).

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