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It has been hypothesized that the variation of the critical currents in Nb/Al–AlO x /Nb junctions is due to, among other effects, the presence of grain boundaries in the system. Motivated by this, we examine the effect of grain boundaries on the critical current of a Josephson junction. We assume that the hopping amplitudes are dependent on the interatomic distance and derive a physically realistic model of distance-dependent hopping amplitudes. We find that the presence of a grain boundary and associated disorder is responsible for a very large drop in the critical current relative to a clean system. We also find that when a tunnel barrier is present, grain boundaries cause substantial variations in the critical currents due to the disordered hoppings near the tunnel barrier. We discuss the applicability of these results to Josephson junctions presently intended for use in superconducting electronics applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate theoretically the origins of observed variations in the critical currents of Nb/Al-AlO x /Nb Josephson junctions in terms of various types of disorder. We consider the following disorder sources: vacancies within the Al layer, thickness variations in the AlO x layer, and "pinholes" (i.e., point contacts) within the AlO x layer. The calculations are all performed by solving the microscopic Bogoliubov–de Gennes Hamiltonian self-consistently. It is found that a small concentration of vacancies within the Al layer is sufficient to suppress the critical current, while the presence of a small number of thick regions of the oxide layer induces a similar effect as well. The pinhole scenario is found to result in anomalous behavior that resembles neither that of a pure tunnel junction nor that of a superconductor–normal–superconductor junction but a regime that interpolates between these two limits. We comment on the degree to which each of the three scenarios describes the actual situation present in these junctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]