Re-Entrant Superconductivity in Planar Josephson Junctions due to Disorder-Induced Interference

In recent years, Josephson junctions have been studied under the influence of an applied in-plane magnetic field for several reasons. These include establishing topological phase transitions which might lead to Majorana zero modes in topological insulator-superconductor junctions, as well as 0-π transitions in monolayer graphene junctions, triplet superconductivity, and the superconducting diode effect in magic angle twisted bilayer graphene based junctions. Specifically, effects such as re-entrant superconductivity, asymmetric in-plane field dependent critical currents and supercurrents surviving at higher magnetic fields have been attributed to such exotic phenomena. In this work, we propose a semi-classical explanation for these in-plane field phenomena observed in planar Josephson junctions, considering the effect of disorder and its contribution to supercurrent interference. We show that by fine-tuning of disorder density and distribution, we can generate oscillations in supercurrent which are point symmetric with respect to in-plane field direction and bias current sweep direction. This framework sheds light on how a seemingly trivial effect, namely disorder induced supercurrent interference under application of in-plane magnetic fields, can give rise to complex and unexpected supercurrent oscillations in these systems.