Anomalous Josephson effect controlled by an Abrikosov vortex
Authors:
S. Mironov, E. Goldobin, D. Koelle, R. Kleiner, Ph. Tamarat, B. Lounis, and A. Buzdin
Phys. Rev. B
Vol. 96, Iss. 21 — 1 December 2017
The possibility of a fast and precise Abrikosov vortex manipulation by a focused laser beam opens the way to create laser-driven Josephson junctions. We theoretically demonstrate that a vortex pinned in the vicinity of the Josephson junction generates an arbitrary ground state phase which can be equal not only to 0 or π but to any desired φ0 value in between. Such φ0 junctions have many peculiar properties and may be effectively controlled by the optically driven Abrikosov vortex. Also we theoretically show that the Josephson junction with the embedded vortex can serve as an ultrafast memory cell operating at sub THz frequencies.
The dependencies of the ground state phase ϕ0 on the dimensionless vortex position X0 along the junction for different values of the phase jump κ. The value δκ/π=(κ−π)/π is equal to (a) −0.02; (b) −0.01; (c) −0.0015; (d) −0.0001; (e) 0; (f) 0.0001; (g) 0.0015; (h) 0.01; (i) 0.02. The blue solid lines correspond to the stable branches realizing the minima of the free energy while the red dashed curves show the metastable solutions for ϕ0.