Supercurrent and Andreev bound state dynamics in superconducting quantum point contacts under microwave irradiation
Entity
UAM. Departamento de Física Teórica de la Materia CondensadaPublisher
American Physical SocietyDate
2011-08-04Citation
10.1103/PhysRevB.84.054504
Physical Review B 84.5 (2011): 054504
ISSN
1098-0121 (print); 1550-235X (online)DOI
10.1103/PhysRevB.84.054504Funded by
This work was supported by the Academy of Finland, the ERC (Grant No. 240362-Heattronics), the Spanish MICINN (Contract No. FIS2008-04209), the Emmy- Noether program of the DFG, and the CSIC (Intramural Project No. 200960I036)Project
Gobierno de España. FIS2008-04209Editor's Version
http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.84.054504Subjects
FísicaRights
© 2011 American Physical SocietyAbstract
We present an extensive theoretical analysis of the supercurrent of a superconducting point contact of arbitrary transparency in the presence of a microwave field. Our paper is mainly based on two different approaches: a two-level model that describes the dynamics of the Andreev bound states in these systems and a fully microscopic method based on the Keldysh–Green function technique. This combination provides both a deep insight into the physics of irradiated Josephson junctions and quantitative predictions for arbitrary range of parameters. The main predictions of our analysis are: (i) for weak fields and low temperatures, the microwaves can induce transitions between the Andreev states, leading to a large suppression of the supercurrent at certain values of the phase; (ii) at strong fields, the current-phase relation is strongly distorted and the corresponding critical current does not follow a simple Bessel-function-like behavior; and (iii) at finite temperatures, the microwave field can enhance the critical current by means of transitions connecting the continuum of states outside the gap region and the Andreev states inside the gap. Our paper is of relevance for a large variety of superconducting weak links as well as for the proposals of using the Andreev bound states of a point contact for quantum computing applications
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Google Scholar:Bergeret, F. S.
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Virtanen, P.
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Ozaeta, A.
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Heikkilä, T. T.
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Cuevas Rodríguez, Juan Carlos
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