Electric field tunable superconductor-semiconductor coupling in Majorana nanowires

Michiel W.A. De Moor, Jouri D.S. Bommer, Di Xu, Georg W. Winkler, Andrey E. Antipov, Arno Bargerbos, Guanzhong Wang, Nick Van Loo, Roy L.M. Op Het Veld, Sasa Gazibegovic, Diana Car, Erik P.A. M Bakkers, Leo P. Kouwenhoven, Hao Zhang*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

83 Citations (Scopus)
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Abstract

We study the effect of external electric fields on superconductor-semiconductor coupling by measuring the electron transport in InSb semiconductor nanowires coupled to an epitaxially grown Al superconductor. We find that the gate voltage induced electric fields can greatly modify the coupling strength, which has consequences for the proximity induced superconducting gap, effective g-factor, and spin-orbit coupling, which all play a key role in understanding Majorana physics. We further show that level repulsion due to spin-orbit coupling in a finite size system can lead to seemingly stable zero bias conductance peaks, which mimic the behavior of Majorana zero modes. Our results improve the understanding of realistic Majorana nanowire systems.

Original languageEnglish
Article number103049
Number of pages25
JournalNew Journal of Physics
Volume20
Issue number10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018

Keywords

  • Majorana fermions
  • nanowires
  • spin-orbit coupling
  • superconductivity

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