PbTe nanowires coupled to a superconductor have recently been proposed as a potential Majorana platform. The hallmark of the one-dimensional nature of ballistic nanowires is their quantized conductance. Here, we report the observation of conductance plateaus at multiples of the quantized value 2e2/h in PbTe nanowires at finite magnetic fields. The quantized plateaus, as a function of source-drain bias and magnetic field, allow for the extraction of the Land\'e g-factor, sub-band spacing and effective mass. The coefficient of 2 in the plateau conductance indicates the presence of valley degeneracy arising from the crystal orientation of the nanowires, which are grown on a (001) substrate. Occasionally, this degeneracy can be lifted by a gate voltage that breaks the mirror symmetry. Our results demonstrate the one-dimensionality of PbTe nanowires and fulfill one of the necessary conditions for the realization of Majorana zero modes.
@article{arxiv.2304.10194,
title = {Conductance Quantization in PbTe Nanowires},
author = {Wenyu Song and Yuhao Wang and Wentao Miao and Zehao Yu and Yichun Gao and Ruidong Li and Shuai Yang and Fangting Chen and Zuhan Geng and Zitong Zhang and Shan Zhang and Yunyi Zang and Zhan Cao and Dong E. Liu and Runan Shang and Xiao Feng and Lin Li and Qi-Kun Xue and Ke He and Hao Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.10194},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
Raw data and processing codes within this paper are available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7848599