Josephson current and noise at a superconductor/quantum-spin-Hall-insulator/superconductor junction

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.