Journal
PHYSICAL REVIEW B
Volume 79, Issue 16, Pages -Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.79.161408
Keywords
cadmium compounds; Josephson effect; mercury compounds; quantum Hall effect; semiconductor quantum wells; SQUIDs; superconductor-semiconductor boundaries
Funding
- NSF [DMR-0605066]
- ACS PRF [44776-AC10]
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We study junctions between superconductors mediated by the edge states of a quantum-spin-Hall insulator. We show that such junctions exhibit a fractional Josephson effect, in which the current phase relation has a 4 pi rather than a 2 pi periodicity. This effect is a consequence of the conservation of fermion parity-the number of electron mod 2-in a superconducting junction and is closely related to the Z(2) topological structure of the quantum-spin-Hall insulator. Inelastic processes, which violate the conservation of fermion parity, lead to telegraph noise in the equilibrium supercurrent. We predict that the low-frequency noise due these processes diverges exponentially with temperature T as T -> 0. Possible experiments on HgCdTe quantum wells will be discussed.
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