Parity Transitions in the Superconducting Ground State of Hybrid InSb-Al Coulomb Islands

Overview

Journal Nat Commun

Specialty Biology

Date 2018 Nov 17

PMID 30442935

Citations 6

Authors

Jie Shen

Sebastian Heedt

Francesco Borsoi

Bernard van Heck

Sasa Gazibegovic

Roy L M Op Het Veld

Diana Car

John A Logan

Mihir Pendharkar

Senja J J Ramakers

Guanzhong Wang

Di Xu

Daniel Bouman

Attila Geresdi

Chris J Palmstrom

Erik P A M Bakkers

Leo P Kouwenhoven

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

The number of electrons in small metallic or semiconducting islands is quantised. When tunnelling is enabled via opaque barriers this number can change by an integer. In superconductors the addition is in units of two electron charges (2e), reflecting that the Cooper pair condensate must have an even parity. This ground state (GS) is foundational for all superconducting qubit devices. Here, we study a hybrid superconducting-semiconducting island and find three typical GS evolutions in a parallel magnetic field: a robust 2e-periodic even-parity GS, a transition to a 2e-periodic odd-parity GS, and a transition from a 2e- to a 1e-periodic GS. The 2e-periodic odd-parity GS persistent in gate-voltage occurs when a spin-resolved subgap state crosses zero energy. For our 1e-periodic GSs we explicitly show the origin being a single zero-energy state gapped from the continuum, i.e., compatible with an Andreev bound states stabilized at zero energy or the presence of Majorana zero modes.

Citing Articles

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Excitations in a superconducting Coulombic energy gap.

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Supercurrent parity meter in a nanowire Cooper pair transistor.

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