Date of Award

January 2012

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Physics & Astrophysics

First Advisor

JU H. KIM

Abstract

A superconducting tunnel junction with two-gap superconductors, such as MgB2 and iron-based superconductors, can lead to more interesting phase dynamics than those with one-gap superconductors. The phase dynamics in a long Josephson junction (LJJ) may be described by using the sine-Gordon equation. The difference in the phase dynamics between the LJJ with two-gap superconductors and that with the one-gap superconductors arises due to the presence of multiple tunneling channels between the superconductor (S) layers and the inter-band Josephson effect within the same S layer. The inter-band Josephson effect leads to both spatial and temporal modulation of the critical current between the two adjacent S layers. In this work, the effects of critical current modulation on the trajectories of the single Josephson vortex (i.e., fluxon) and the current-voltage characteristics of the two-gap superconductor-based LJJ are estimated. Also, the possibility of a broken time-reversal symmetry state ground state of a single LJJ due to the presence of additional tunneling channels is investigated by using a microscopic model for two-gap superconductors. The consequence of this broken time reversal ground state is discussed. Finally, the equation of motion for fluxon for coupled LJJs interacting via both the magnetic induction effect and charging effect is investigated. As the inter-band Josephson effect is found to affect the dynamics of a single fluxon in a single LJJ, this effect is explicitly taken into account for a two-coupled LJJ stack. This equation of motion is expected to be an excellent starting point for exploring interesting LJJ properties such as collective dynamics of fluxons as well as fractional fluxons.

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