Evidence for 4e charge of Cooper quartets in a biased multi-terminal graphene-based Josephson junction.

In a Josephson junction (JJ) at zero bias, Cooper pairs are transported between two superconducting contacts via the Andreev bound states (ABSs) formed in the Josephson channel. Extending JJs to multiple superconducting contacts, the ABSs in the Josephson channel can coherently hybridize Cooper pairs among different superconducting electrodes. Biasing three-terminal JJs with antisymmetric voltages, for example, results in a direct current (DC) of Cooper quartet (CQ), which involves a four-fermion entanglement. Here, we report half a flux periodicity in the interference of CQ formed in graphene based multi-terminal (MT) JJs with a magnetic flux loop. We observe that the quartet differential conductance associated with supercurrent exhibits magneto-oscillations associated with a charge of 4e, thereby presenting evidence for interference between different CQ processes. The CQ critical current shows non-monotonic bias dependent behavior, which can be modeled by transitions between Floquet-ABSs. Our experimental observation for voltage-tunable non-equilibrium CQ-ABS in flux-loop-JJs significantly extends our understanding of MT-JJs, enabling future design of topologically unique ABS spectrum. © 2022. The Author(s).

Citation

Ko-Fan Huang, Yuval Ronen, Régis Mélin, Denis Feinberg, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Philip Kim. Evidence for 4e charge of Cooper quartets in a biased multi-terminal graphene-based Josephson junction. Nature communications. 2022 May 31;13(1):3032

PMID: 35641534

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