Hanbury Brown and Twiss Correlations of Cooper Pairs in Helical Liquids

Mahn-Soo Choi

Published 2010-02-16, updated 2014-01-21Version 2

We propose a Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) experiment of Cooper pairs on the edge channels of quantum spin Hall insulators. The helical edge channels provide a well defined beam of Cooper pairs and perfect Andreev reflections from superconductors. Surprisingly, the Cooper pairs do not bear a bosonic nature at all once emitted from the superconductor, and the cross correlation is strongly negative as for free electrons. This result is counter-intuitive, and seemingly contradictory to the previous theoretical and recent experimental results. We will point out that our setup is much closer in spirit to the original HBT experiment (and different) than those in previous works. We will argue that these differences affect significantly the results.