Supercurrent in Nb/InAs-nanowire/Nb Josephson junctions

We report on the fabrication and measurements of planar mesoscopic Josephson junctions formed by InAs nanowires coupled to superconducting Nb terminals. The use of Si-doped InAs-nanowires with different bulk carrier concentrations allowed to tune the properties of the junctions. We have studied the junction characteristics as a function of temperature, gate voltage, and magnetic field. For junctions with high doping concentrations in the nanowire, Josephson supercurrent values up to 100 nA are found. Owing to the use of Nb as superconductor, the Josephson coupling persists at temperatures up to 4 K. In all junctions, the critical current monotonously decreased with the magnetic field, which can be explained by a recently developed theoretical model for the proximity effect in ultra-small Josephson junctions. For the low-doped Josephson junctions, a control of the critical current by varying the gate voltage has been demonstrated. We have studied conductance fluctuations in nanowires coupled to superconducting and normal metal terminals. The conductance fluctuation amplitude is found to be about 6 times larger in superconducting contacted nanowires. The enhancement of the conductance fluctuations is attributed to phase-coherent Andreev reflection as well as to the large number of phase-coherent channels due to the large superconducting gap of the Nb electrodes. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4745024]