Clean one-dimensional electron systems can exhibit quantized conductance. The plateau conductance doubles if the transport is dominated by Andreev reflection. Here, we report quantized conductance observed in both Andreev and normal-state transports in PbTe-Pb and PbTe-In hybrid nanowires. The Andreev plateau is observed at 4e2/h, twice of the normal plateau value of 2e2/h. In comparison, Andreev conductance in the best-optimized III-V nanowires is non-quantized due to mode-mixing induced dips (a disorder effect), despite the quantization of normal-state transport. The negligible mode mixing in PbTe hybrids indicates an unprecedented low-disorder transport regime for nanowire devices, beneficial for Majorana researches.
@article{arxiv.2406.11211,
title = {Quantized Andreev conductance in semiconductor nanowires},
author = {Yichun Gao and Wenyu Song and Yuhao Wang and Zuhan Geng and Zhan Cao and Zehao Yu and Shuai Yang and Jiaye Xu and Fangting Chen and Zonglin Li and Ruidong Li and Lining Yang and Zhaoyu Wang and Shan Zhang and Xiao Feng and Tiantian Wang and Yunyi Zang and Lin Li and Dong E. Liu and Runan Shang and Qi-Kun Xue and Ke He and Hao Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.11211},
year = {2025}
}