English

Microwave spectroscopy of spinful Andreev bound states in ballistic semiconductor Josephson junctions

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2017-10-24 v2 Superconductivity

Abstract

The superconducting proximity effect in semiconductor nanowires has recently enabled the study of new superconducting architectures, such as gate-tunable superconducting qubits and multiterminal Josephson junctions. As opposed to their metallic counterparts, the electron density in semiconductor nanosystems is tunable by external electrostatic gates providing a highly scalable and in-situ variation of the device properties. In addition, semiconductors with large gg-factor and spin-orbit coupling have been shown to give rise to exotic phenomena in superconductivity, such as φ0\varphi_0 Josephson junctions and the emergence of Majorana bound states. Here, we report microwave spectroscopy measurements that directly reveal the presence of Andreev bound states (ABS) in ballistic semiconductor channels. We show that the measured ABS spectra are the result of transport channels with gate-tunable, high transmission probabilities up to 0.90.9, which is required for gate-tunable Andreev qubits and beneficial for braiding schemes of Majorana states. For the first time, we detect excitations of a spin-split pair of ABS and observe symmetry-broken ABS, a direct consequence of the spin-orbit coupling in the semiconductor.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1609.00333,
  title  = {Microwave spectroscopy of spinful Andreev bound states in ballistic semiconductor Josephson junctions},
  author = {David J. van Woerkom and Alex Proutski and Bernard van Heck and Daniël Bouman and Jukka I. Väyrynen and Leonid I. Glazman and Peter Krogstrup and Jesper Nygård and Leo P. Kouwenhoven and Attila Geresdi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.00333},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

Raw data and calculations are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.4121/uuid:8c4a0604-ac00-4164-a37a-dad8b9d2f580