Josephson effect in Graphene SNS Junction with a Single Localized Defect

Imperfections change essentially the electronic transport properties of graphene. Motivated by a recent experiment reporting on the possible application of graphene as junctions, we study transport properties in graphene-based junctions with single localized defect. We solve the Dirac-Bogoliubov-de-Gennes equation with a single localized defect superconductor-normal(graphene)-superconductor (SNS) junction. We consider the properties of tunneling conductance and Josephson current through an undoped strip of graphene with heavily doped s-wave superconducting electrodes in the dirty limit. We find that spectrum of Andreev bound states are modified in the presence of single localized defect in the bulk and the minimum tunneling conductance remains the same. The Josephson junction exhibits sign oscillations.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Phases and Density of States in a Generalized Su-Schrieffer-Heeger Model

Self-consistent solutions to a generalized Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model on a 2-dimensional square lattice are investigated. Away from half-filling, spatially inhomogeneous phases are found. Those phases may have topological structures on the flux order, large unit cell bond order, localized bipolarons, or they are simply short-range ordered and glassy. They have an universal feature of always possessing a gap at the Fermi level.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

On the Zero-Bias Conductance Peak in the Tunneling Spectroscopy

A generalized method of image, incorporated with the non-equilibrium Keldysh-Green's function formalism, is employed to investigate the tunneling spectroscopy of hybrid systems in the configuration of planar junction. In particular, tunneling spectroscopies of several hybrid systems that exhibit zero-bias conductance peaks (ZBCP) are examined. The well-known metal--d-wave superconductor (ND) junction is first examined in detail. Both the evolution of the ZBCP versus doping and the splitting of the ZBCP in magnetic fields are computed in the framework of the slave-boson mean field theory. Further extension of our method to analyze other states shows that states with particle-hole pairing, such as d-density wave and graphene sheet, are all equivalent to a simple 1D model, which at the same time also describes the polyacetylene. We provide the criteria for the emergence of ZBCP. In particular, broken reflection symmetry at the microscopic level is shown to be a necessary condition for ZBCP to occur

Current transport in a superconducting superlattice system

We investigate the effect of the superlattice structure on the single particle transport along the c-axis of high temperature superconductors. In particular, superlattice systems that consists of metals/insulators and d-wave superconductors (NS/IS superlattice) are considered. We find that for the NS superlattice in the large mass anisotropy limit of the metal, the density of state in the low energy section is bulk d-wave like except that the position of the quasi-particle peak can be considerably smaller than the gap value, while for the IS superlattice, the quasi-particle peak remains at the gap value. We also calculate the nonlinear differential conductance in the planar junction measurement. It is found that the width of the Andreev peak at zero-bias may be affected strongly by the superlattice structure, specifically, it can be considerably reduced due to the destructive interference of the Andreev reflections from all the superconductors. Such a reduction in the width makes the Andreev peak resonant-like and has been observed in a recent experiment.Comment: 21 pages, 14 figure

Transport in quantum wells in the presence of interface roughness

The effective Hamiltonian for two dimensional quantum wells with rough interfaces is formally derived. Two new terms are generated. The first term is identified to the local energy level fluctuations, which was introduced phenomenologically in the literature for interface roughness scattering but is now shown to be valid only for an infinite potential well or Hamiltonians with one single length scale. The other term is shown to modulate the wavefunction and cause fluctuations in the charge density. This will further reduce the electron mobility to the magnitude that is close to the experimental result.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, a shorter version of this paper is to be published in Phys. Rev.

Unconventional superconducting gap via spin fluctuations in iron-vacancy ordered Ay_{y}Fe2−x_{2-x}Se2_{2}

Based on an effective 12-orbital tight-binding model, we examine the superconducting states induced by the antiferromagnetic fluctuations for iron-vacancy-ordered A$_{y}$Fe$_{2-x}$Se$_{2}$. It is shown that due to the broken reflection symmetry induced by the iron vacancies, new superconducting states with $C_{4h}$ symmetry emerge. In particular, we show that in the $C_{4h}$ symmetry, symmetric axes of the pairing momenta do not need to coincide with axes of the unit cell. As a result, in addition to the magnitude of the pairing gap, the relative orientation of the pairing wave function to the lattice forms another degree of freedom for characterizing the superconducting gap and can further help in gaining the condensation energy. Nonetheless, similar to other iron-based superconductors, the singlet ground state is still dominated by s-wave or d-wave, which are nearly degenerate with anisotropic gaps. Furthermore, s-wave and d-wave superconducting states are separated by a quantum critical point controlled by the Hund's rule coupling $J_{H}$.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure

Generalized method of image and the tunneling spectroscopy in high-Tc superconductors

A generalized method of image is developed to investigate the tunneling spectrum from the metal into a class of states, with the tight-binding dispersion fully included. The broken reflection symmetry is shown to be the necessary condition for the appearance of the zero-bias conductance peak (ZBCP). Applying this method to the d-wave superconductor yields results in agreement with experiments regarding the splitting of ZBCPs in magnetic field. Furthermore, a ZBCP is predicted for tunneling into the (110) direction of the d-density wave state, providing a signature to look for in experiments

Electron scattering from a mesoscopic disk in Rashba system

Electrons with spin-orbit coupling moving in mesoscopic structures can often exhibit local spin polarization. In this paper, we study the influence of the Rashba coupling on the scattering of two-dimensional electrons from a circular disk. It is observed that spin-polarized regions exist, even if the incident electrons are unpolarized. In addition to the distributions of charge and spin current in the near-field region, we also analyze the symmetry and the differential cross-section of the scattering.Comment: 13 page, 4 figure

Continuum model description of thin film growth morphology

We examine the applicability of the continuum model to describe the surface morphology of a hetero-growth system: compositionally-graded, relaxed GeSi films on (001) Si substrates. Surface roughness versus lateral dimension was analyzed for samples what were grown under different conditions. We find that all samples belong to the same growth class, in which the surface roughness scales linearly with lateral size at small scales and appears to saturate at large scales. For length scales ranging from 1 nm to 100 $\mu$m, the scaling behavior can be described by a linear continuum model consisting of a surface diffusion term and a Laplacian term. However, in-depth analysis on non-universal amplitudes indicates the breaking of up-down symmetry, suggesting the presence of non-linear terms in the microscopic model. We argue that the leading non-linear term has the form of $\lambda _1(\nabla h)^2$, but its effect on scaling exponents will not be evident for length scales less than 1 mm. Therefore, the growth dynamics of this system is described by the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, consisting of the two linear terms plus $\lambda _1(\nabla h)^2$, driven by a Gaussian noise. We also discuss the negative coefficient in the Laplacian term as an instability mechanism responsible for large scale film morphology on the final surface.Comment: 25 pages, revtex, 6 figures available upon request, to appear in Phys. Rev.

Duality in topological superconductors and topological ferromagnetic insulators in a honeycomb lattice

The ground state of large Hubbard $U$ limit of a honeycomb lattice near half-filling is known to be a singlet $d+id$-wave superconductor. It is also known that this $d+id$ superconductor exhibits a chiral $p+ip$ pairing locally at the Dirac cone, characterized by a $2\mathbb{Z}$ topological invariant. By constructing a dual transformation, we demonstrate that this $2\mathbb{Z}$ topological superconductor is equivalent to a collection of two topological ferromagnetic insulators. As a result of the duality, the topology of the electronic structures for a $d+id$ superconductor is controllable via the change of the chemical potential by tuning the gate voltage. In particular, instead of being always a chiral superconductor, we find that the $d+id$ superconductor undergoes a topological phase transition from a chiral superconductor to a quasi-helical superconductor as the gap amplitude or the chemical potential decreases. The quasi-helical superconducting phase is found to be characterized by a topological invariant in the pseudo-spin charge sector with vanishing both the Chern number and the spin Chern number. We further elucidate the topological phase transition by analyzing the relationship between the topological invariant and the rotation symmetry. Due to the angular momentum carried by the gap function and spin-orbit interactions, we show that by placing $d+id$ superconductors in proximity to ferromagnets, varieties of chiral superconducting phases characterized by higher Chern numbers can be accessed, providing a new platform for hosting large numbers of Majorana modes at edges.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure