Proximity effect between a high temperature superconductor and graphene

Overview & Synopsis

We have fabricated YBCO graphene junction. We studied the electronical transport at the interface between these two materials as well as the mechanism - the Andreev reflexion- by which a current carried by electrons is transformed into a current carried by Cooper pairs. We observed electronic interferences as a function of graphene doping. This modulation comes from the presence of a potential barrier at the interface between YBCO and graphene in which the particles are circulating before being transmitted or reflected. These interferences correspond to Klein tunneling of normal electrons when their energy is higher than the superconducting gap. At lower energy, Cooper pairs can traverse the barrier by Klein tunneling. We later fabricated YBCO graphene junctions which size is comparable to the graphene coherence length. We observed tunnel conductance when the interface between graphene and YBCO is opaque. In the case when the interface is transparent, we observed oscillations of the junction conductance as a function of the bias voltage and of the gate voltage. These oscillations seem to originate from electronic interferences inside the graphene channel between the superconducting electrodes. We also propose an experimental method to fabricate phi junction based on BSCCO.