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Tunable Klein-like tunnelling of high-temperature superconducting pairs into graphene

Nature Physics volume 14, pages 25–29 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Superconductivity can be induced in a normal material via the ‘leakage’ of superconducting pairs of charge carriers from an adjacent superconductor. This so-called proximity effect is markedly influenced by graphene’s unique electronic structure, both in fundamental and technologically relevant ways. These include an unconventional form1,2 of the ‘leakage’ mechanism—the Andreev reflection3—and the potential of supercurrent modulation through electrical gating4. Despite the interest of high-temperature superconductors in that context5,6, realizations have been exclusively based on low-temperature ones. Here we demonstrate a gate-tunable, high-temperature superconducting proximity effect in graphene. Notably, gating effects result from the perfect transmission of superconducting pairs across an energy barrier—a form of Klein tunnelling7,8, up to now observed only for non-superconducting carriers9,10—and quantum interferences controlled by graphene doping. Interestingly, we find that this type of interference becomes dominant without the need of ultraclean graphene, in stark contrast to the case of low-temperature superconductors11. These results pave the way to a new class of tunable, high-temperature Josephson devices based on large-scale graphene.

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Figure 1: Sample fabrication steps.
Figure 2: Temperature and gate-voltage dependent conductance.
Figure 3: Gate-voltage effects: experiment and simulations.

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Acknowledgements

Work at CNRS/Thales was supported by the French National Research Agency through ‘Investissements d’Avenir’ program Labex NanoSaclay (ANR-10-LABX-0035) and by the EU Work Programme under Grant Graphene Flagship (No. 604391) and Core1 (No. 696656). R.G. acknowledges funding from the Marie-Curie-ITN 607904-SPINOGRAPH. S.H. acknowledges funding from EPSRC grants EP/K016636/1 and EP/P005152/1. P.S. acknowledges the Institut Universitaire de France for a junior fellowship. We thank A. S. Mel’Nikov, J. Linder, J. Santamaría, S. Gueron and H. Bouchiat for useful discussions. We thank Y. Le Gall for assistance during ion irradiation.

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Author notes

  1. David Perconte and Fabian A. Cuellar: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Unité Mixte de Physique, CNRS, Thales, Univ. Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, 91767 Palaiseau, France

    David Perconte, Fabian A. Cuellar, Constance Moreau-Luchaire, Maelis Piquemal-Banci, Regina Galceran, Rozenn Bernard, Bruno Dlubak, Pierre Seneor & Javier E. Villegas

  2. Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 0FA, UK

    Piran R. Kidambi, Marie-Blandine Martin & Stephan Hofmann

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  1. David Perconte
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Contributions

J.E.V. and P.S. conceived the experiments. R.B. fabricated the YBCO films. P.R.K., M.-B.M. and S.H. fabricated the graphene sheets. F.A.C., fabricated the devices, with contributions from D.P., B.D., R.G. and M.P.-B. F.A.C. performed transport experiments, with contributions of D.P. and C.M.-L. D.P. performed numerical simulations. The figures were prepared and the paper written by D.P., F.A.C. and J.E.V., with contributions from all the other authors. All of the authors participated in the discussion of the results.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Pierre Seneor or Javier E. Villegas.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Perconte, D., Cuellar, F., Moreau-Luchaire, C. et al. Tunable Klein-like tunnelling of high-temperature superconducting pairs into graphene. Nature Phys 14, 25–29 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys4278

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