Abstract
A detailed theoretical interpretation of the Josephson interference experiment between Sr2RuO4 and Pb reported by Kidwingira et al (2006 Science 314 1267) is given. Assuming chiral p-wave pairing symmetry, a Ginzburg–Landau theory is derived in order to investigate the structure of domain walls between chiral domains. It turns out that anisotropy effects of the Fermi surface and the orientation of the domain walls are essential for their internal structure. Introducing a simple model for a Josephson junction, the effect of domain walls intersecting the interface between Sr2RuO4 and Pb is discussed. It is shown that characteristic deviations of the Fraunhofer interference pattern for the critical Josephson current as a function of the magnetic field occurs in qualitative agreement with the experimental finding. Moreover, the model is also able to account for peculiar hysteresis effects observed in the experiment.
Highlights
This finding could eventually provide indirect evidence for the presence of domain walls in the p-wave superconductor
Motivated by the experiments of Kidwingira et al on Josephson junctions between Sr2RuO4 and the conventional superconductor Pb [1], we studied the effect of the domain walls on the Josephson interference effect in a magnetic field, assuming that Sr2RuO4 is a chiral p-wave superconductor
We analyzed the domain wall structure and showed that its internal phase structure is crucial for the Josephson effect, if the domain walls intersect the Josephson junction
Summary
Our study on the Josephson effect involves both a conventional s-wave and a chiral p-wave superconductor, representing the experimental arrangement of Pb coupled to Sr2RuO4 [1]. We first introduce here the basic order parameters and their corresponding Ginzburg–Landau theories that will be used later to discuss the structure of domain walls in the chiral p-wave state and their influence on the Josephson effect in configurations, as shown in figure 1. Minimizing the free energy functional with respect to |η0| in the homogeneous case, we obtain the uniform phase η. Such that the corresponding gap function is d±(k) = η0(T )z(kx ± iky). The two states with opposite relative sign are degenerate and violate time reversal symmetry, as the operation of time reversal. We will first analyze the structure of domain walls between such domains of opposite chirality and their influence on the Josephson effect in geometries as shown in figure 1
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