Abstract
We study the effect of external electric fields on superconductor-semiconductor coupling by measuring the electron transport in InSb semiconductor nanowires coupled to an epitaxially grown Al superconductor. We find that the gate voltage induced electric fields can greatly modify the coupling strength, which has consequences for the proximity induced superconducting gap, effective g-factor, and spin-orbit coupling, which all play a key role in understanding Majorana physics. We further show that level repulsion due to spin-orbit coupling in a finite size system can lead to seemingly stable zero bias conductance peaks, which mimic the behavior of Majorana zero modes. Our results improve the understanding of realistic Majorana nanowire systems.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 103049 |
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | New Journal of Physics |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue number | 10 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 31 Oct 2018 |
Funding
We thank JG Kroll, A Proutski, and S Goswami for useful discussions. This work has been supported by the European Research Council, the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research, the Laboratory for Physical Sciences, and Microsoft Corporation Station Q.
Keywords
- Majorana fermions
- nanowires
- spin-orbit coupling
- superconductivity