Disorder is the primary obstacle in current Majorana nanowire experiments. Reducing disorder or achieving ballistic transport is thus of paramount importance. In clean and ballistic nanowire devices, quantized conductance is expected with plateau quality serving as a benchmark for disorder assessment. Here, we introduce ballistic PbTe nanowire devices grown using the selective-area-growth (SAG) technique. Quantized conductance plateaus in units of 2e2/h are observed at zero magnetic field. This observation represents an advancement in diminishing disorder within SAG nanowires, as none of the previously studied SAG nanowires (InSb or InAs) exhibit zero-field ballistic transport. Notably, the plateau values indicate that the ubiquitous valley degeneracy in PbTe is lifted in nanowire devices. This degeneracy lifting addresses an additional concern in the pursuit of Majorana realization. Moreover, these ballistic PbTe nanowires may enable the search for clean signatures of the spin-orbit helical gap in future devices.
@article{arxiv.2309.05966,
title = {Ballistic PbTe Nanowire Devices},
author = {Yuhao Wang and Fangting Chen and Wenyu Song and Zuhan Geng and Zehao Yu and Lining Yang and Yichun Gao and Ruidong Li and Shuai Yang and Wentao Miao and Wei Xu and Zhaoyu Wang and Zezhou Xia and Huading Song and Xiao Feng and Yunyi Zang and Lin Li and Runan Shang and Qi-Kun Xue and Ke He and Hao Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.05966},
year = {2023}
}