Gapless Andreev Bound States in the Quantum Spin Hall Insulator HgTe

Overview

Journal Nat Nanotechnol

Specialty Biotechnology

Date 2016 Nov 8

PMID 27570940

Citations 20

Authors

Erwann Bocquillon

Russell S Deacon

Jonas Wiedenmann

Philipp Leubner

Teunis M Klapwijk

Christoph Brune

Koji Ishibashi

Hartmut Buhmann

Laurens W Molenkamp

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

In recent years, Majorana physics has attracted considerable attention because of exotic new phenomena and its prospects for fault-tolerant topological quantum computation. To this end, one needs to engineer the interplay between superconductivity and electronic properties in a topological insulator, but experimental work remains scarce and ambiguous. Here, we report experimental evidence for topological superconductivity induced in a HgTe quantum well, a 2D topological insulator that exhibits the quantum spin Hall (QSH) effect. The a.c. Josephson effect demonstrates that the supercurrent has a 4π periodicity in the superconducting phase difference, as indicated by a doubling of the voltage step for multiple Shapiro steps. In addition, this response like that of a superconducting quantum interference device to a perpendicular magnetic field shows that the 4π-periodic supercurrent originates from states located on the edges of the junction. Both features appear strongest towards the QSH regime, and thus provide evidence for induced topological superconductivity in the QSH edge states.

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