Josephson effect of the superconducting van der Waals junction

Heterostructures fabricated by various combinations of van der Waals (vdW) materials enable us to investigate disorder-free physical properties and realize novel functional devices. Superconducting vdW junctions have attracted a lot of attention because of its simple structure without a barrier layer. In superconducting vdW junction, without extra fabrication effort, a natural barrier can be formed, whose character is sensitive to distance and angle of lattice between two superconducting vdW materials. Using high-quality single crystals and the dry transfer technique, we fabricated the vertically stacked NbSe2/NbSe2 and FeSe/FeSe vdW junctions and investigated their Josephson junction properties. We found that in the FeSe junctions, Josephson coupling is extremely sensitive to the fabrication conditions, in contrast to the NbSe2 junctions. We attributed this distinct character of the FeSe junctions to surface instability and small Fermi surface of FeSe.