Anomalous transport effects on switching currents of graphene-based Josephson junctions

Abstract

We explore the effect of noise on the ballistic graphene-based small Josephson junctions in the framework of the resistively and capacitively shunted model. We use the non-sinusoidal current–phase relation specific for graphene layers partially covered by superconducting electrodes. The noise induced escapes from the metastable states, when the external bias current is ramped, given the switching current distribution, i.e. the probability distribution of the passages to finite voltage from the superconducting state as a function of the bias current, that is the information more promptly available in the experiments. We consider a noise source that is a mixture of two different types of processes: a Gaussian contribution to simulate an uncorrelated ordinary thermal bath, and non-Gaussian, α-stable (or Lévy) term, generally associated to non-equilibrium transport phenomena. We find that the analysis of the switching current distribution makes it possible to efficiently detect a non-Gaussian noise component in a Gaussian background.