2003/05/15 by Dominique Gobert, U. Schollwöck, Ulrich Schollwock +1 · 1 citation
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Iron-based superconductors research #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.1140/epjb/e2004-00145-6
published as European Physical Journal B 38, 501 (2004)
arxiv created 2003/05/15 · openalex publication_date 2004/04/01 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
We investigate the Josephson effect between two coupled superconductors, coupled by the tunneling of pairs of electrons, in the regime that their energy level spacing is comparable to the bulk superconducting gap, but neglecting any charging effects. In this regime, BCS theory is not valid, and the notion of a superconducting order parameter with a well-defined phase is inapplicable. Using the density matrix renormalization group, we calculate the ground state of the two coupled superconductors and extract the Josephson energy. The Josephson energy is found to display a reentrant behavior (decrease followed by increase) as a function of increasing level spacing. For weak Josephson coupling, a tight-binding approximation is introduced, which illustrates the physical mechanism underlying this reentrance in a transparent way. The DMRG method is also applied to two strongly coupled superconductors and allows a detailed examination of the limits of validity of the tight-binding model.