Transport across junctions of pseudospin-one fermions

Sourav Nandy, K. Sengupta, and Diptiman Sen
Phys. Rev. B 100, 085134 – Published 23 August 2019

Abstract

We study transport across ballistic junctions of materials which host pseudospin-one fermions as emergent low-energy quasiparticles. The effective low-energy Hamiltonians of such fermions are described by integer spin Weyl models. We show that current conservation in such integer spin-s Weyl systems requires continuity across a boundary of only 2s (out of 2s+1) components of the wave function. Using the current conservation conditions, we study the transport between normal metal-barrier-normal metal (NBN) and normal metal-barrier-superconductor (NBS) junctions of such systems in the presence of an applied voltage eV. We show that for a specific value of the barrier potential U0, such NBN junctions act as perfect collimators; any quasiparticle which is incident on the barrier with a nonzero angle of incidence is reflected back with unit probability for any barrier width d. We discover an interesting symmetry of this system, namely, the conductance is invariant under U02(μL±eV)U0, where μL is the chemical potential and the +() sign corresponds to particle (hole) mediated transport. For NBS junctions with a proximity-induced s-wave pairing potential, which also display such a collimation, we chart out the properties of the subgap tunneling conductance G as a function of the barrier strength and applied voltage. We point out the effect of the collimation on the subgap tunneling conductance of these NBS junctions and discuss experiments which can test our theory.

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  • Received 20 February 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.100.085134

©2019 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Sourav Nandy1, K. Sengupta1, and Diptiman Sen2

  • 1School of Physical Sciences, Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, 2A and 2B Raja S. C. Mullick Road, Jadavpur 700032, India
  • 2Centre for High Energy Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru 560012, India

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Issue

Vol. 100, Iss. 8 — 15 August 2019

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