  We investigate the Josephson effect between two coupled superconductors,
coupled by the tunneling of pairs of electrons, in the regime that their energy
level spacing is comparable to the bulk superconducting gap, but neglecting any
charging effects. In this regime, BCS theory is not valid, and the notion of a
superconducting order parameter with a well-defined phase is inapplicable.
Using the density matrix renormalization group, we calculate the ground state
of the two coupled superconductors and extract the Josephson energy. The
Josephson energy is found to display a reentrant behavior (decrease followed by
increase) as a function of increasing level spacing. For weak Josephson
coupling, a tight-binding approximation is introduced, which illustrates the
physical mechanism underlying this reentrance in a transparent way. The DMRG
method is also applied to two strongly coupled superconductors and allows a
detailed examination of the limits of validity of the tight-binding model.
