Enhancing the Josephson diode effect with Majorana bound states
Jorge Cayao, Naoto Nagaosa, Yukio Tanaka
Abstract
We consider phase-biased Josephson junctions with spin-orbit coupling under external magnetic fields and study the emergence of the Josephson diode effect in the presence of Majorana bound states. We show that junctions having middle regions with Zeeman fields along the spin-orbit axis develop a low-energy Andreev spectrum that is asymmetric with respect to the superconducting phase difference <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><a:mrow><a:mi>ϕ</a:mi><a:mo>=</a:mo><a:mi>π</a:mi></a:mrow></a:math>, which is strongly influenced by Majorana bound states in the topological phase. This asymmetric Andreev spectrum gives rise to anomalous current-phase curves and critical currents that are different for positive and negative supercurrents, thus signaling the emergence of the Josephson diode effect. While this effect exists even in the trivial phase, it gets enhanced in the topological phase due to the spatial nonlocality of Majorana bound states. Our paper thus establishes the utilization of topological superconductivity for enhancing the functionalities of Josephson diodes. Published by the American Physical Society 2024