We report the realization of epitaxial indium thin films on PbTe nanowires. The film is continuous and forms an atomically sharp interface with PbTe. Tunneling devices reveal a hard superconducting gap. The gap size, 1.08 to 1.18 meV, is twice as large as bulk indium's (∼ 0.5 meV), due to the presence of PbTe. A similar enhancement is also observed in the critical temperature of In on a PbTe substrate. Subgap peaks appear at finite magnetic fields. The effective g-factor (15-45) is notably enhanced compared to bare PbTe wires (< 10) due to the presence of In, differing from Al-hybrids. Josephson devices exhibit gate-tunable supercurrents. The PbTe-In hybrid enhances the properties of both, the superconductivity of In and g-factors of PbTe, and thus may enable exotic phases of matter such as topological superconductivity.
@article{arxiv.2402.04024,
title = {Enhanced superconductivity in PbTe-In hybrids},
author = {Zuhan Geng and Fangting Chen and Yichun Gao and Lining Yang and Yuhao Wang and Shuai Yang and Shan Zhang and Zonglin Li and Wenyu Song and Jiaye Xu and Zehao Yu and Ruidong Li and Zhaoyu Wang and Xiao Feng and Tiantian Wang and Yunyi Zang and Lin Li and Runan Shang and Qi-Kun Xue and Ke He and Hao Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.04024},
year = {2025}
}