Diode effect in the Fraunhofer pattern of disordered planar Josephson junctions

Abstract The Josephson diode effect describes the property of a Josephson junction to have different values of the critical current for different directions of applied bias current and it is the focus of intense research thanks to the potential technological applications. The ubiquity of the experimentally reported phenomenology calls for a study of the impact that disorder can have in the appearance of the effect. We study the Fraunhofer pattern of planar Josephson junctions in presence of different kinds of disorder and imperfections and we find that a junction that is mirror symmetric at zero-field forbids the diode effect and that the diode effect is typically magnified at the nodal points of the Fraunhofer pattern. The work presents a comprehensive treatment of the role of pure spatial inhomogeneity in the emergence of a diode effect in planar junctions, with an extension to the multi-terminal case and to systems of Josephson junctions connected in parallel.