Emergent ferromagnetism with superconductivity in Fe(Te,Se) van der Waals Josephson junctions

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 14; no. 1; p. 6691
• Main Authors: Qiu, Gang, Yang, Hung-Yu, Hu, Lunhui, Zhang, Huairuo, Chen, Chih-Yen, Lyu, Yanfeng, Eckberg, Christopher, Deng, Peng, Krylyuk, Sergiy, Davydov, Albert V., Zhang, Ruixing, Wang, Kang L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 23.10.2023; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 639/301/119/1003; 639/766/119/997; Broken symmetry; Computers; Cooling; Electrons; Fault tolerance; Ferromagnetism; Flakes; Humanities and Social Sciences; Hysteresis; Iron; Josephson junctions; Magnetic fields; Magnetism; multidisciplinary; Order parameters; Quantum computers; Qubits (quantum computing); Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Selenium; Signatures; Spectrum analysis; Stochasticity; Superconductivity; Symmetry; Tellurium; Topological superconductors
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-42447-4

Ferromagnetism and superconductivity are two key ingredients for topological superconductors, which can serve as building blocks of fault-tolerant quantum computers. Adversely, ferromagnetism and superconductivity are typically also two hostile orderings competing to align spins in different configurations, and thus making the material design and experimental implementation extremely challenging. A single material platform with concurrent ferromagnetism and superconductivity is actively pursued. In this paper, we fabricate van der Waals Josephson junctions made with iron-based superconductor Fe(Te,Se), and report the global device-level transport signatures of interfacial ferromagnetism emerging with superconducting states for the first time. Magnetic hysteresis in the junction resistance is observed only below the superconducting critical temperature, suggesting an inherent correlation between ferromagnetic and superconducting order parameters. The 0-π phase mixing in the Fraunhofer patterns pinpoints the ferromagnetism on the junction interface. More importantly, a stochastic field-free superconducting diode effect was observed in Josephson junction devices, with a significant diode efficiency up to 10%, which unambiguously confirms the spontaneous time-reversal symmetry breaking. Our work demonstrates a new way to search for topological superconductivity in iron-based superconductors for future high T c fault-tolerant qubit implementations from a device perspective. The authors study Josephson junctions where the superconductors are Fe(Te,Se) flakes and the weak link is just a 0.36 nm van-der-Waals gap between the two stacked flakes. They report global device-level transport signatures of interfacial ferromagnetism.