Paper detail

Josephson effect for superconductors lacking center of inversion

Due to the absence of a center of inversion in some superconducting compounds, a p-wave admixture to the dominant d-wave order parameter must exist. If time-reversal is also violated, an allowed invariant is the product of the d-wave, p-wave and an appropriately directed current. We show that this leads to an anomalous Josephson current for tunneling along the direction parallel to the axis of the p-wave component, where the current is the Meissner current and the Josephson loop current along the surface of the tunnel barrier. These ideas are applied to the superconducting state of the cuprates in the pseudogap region of the phase diagram where in the normal phase some experiments have detected a time-reversal and inversion symmetry broken phase. The effect is relevant also to heavy-fermion compounds which lack center of inversion due to crystalline symmetry.