Impact of Junction Length on Supercurrent Resilience against Magnetic Field in InSb-Al Nanowire Josephson Junctions

Nano Lett. 2023 Jun 14;23(11):4716-4722. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.2c04485. Epub 2023 May 22.

Abstract

Semiconducting nanowire Josephson junctions represent an attractive platform to investigate the anomalous Josephson effect and detect topological superconductivity. However, an external magnetic field generally suppresses the supercurrent through hybrid nanowire junctions and significantly limits the field range in which the supercurrent phenomena can be studied. In this work, we investigate the impact of the length of InSb-Al nanowire Josephson junctions on the supercurrent resilience against magnetic fields. We find that the critical parallel field of the supercurrent can be considerably enhanced by reducing the junction length. Particularly, in 30 nm long junctions supercurrent can persist up to 1.3 T parallel field─approaching the critical field of the superconducting film. Furthermore, we embed such short junctions into a superconducting loop and obtain the supercurrent interference at a parallel field of 1 T. Our findings are highly relevant for multiple experiments on hybrid nanowires requiring a magnetic-field-resilient supercurrent.

Keywords: Josephson junction; resilient supercurrent; superconducting interference.