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arXiv · 1609.07582

Scaling of sub-gap excitations in a superconductor-semiconductor nanowire quantum dot

Eduardo J. H. Lee·Xiaocheng Jiang·Rok Zitko·Ramon Aguado·Charles M. Lieber·Silvano De Franceschi
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Abstract

A quantum dot coupled to a superconducting contact provides a tunable artificial analogue of a magnetic atom in a superconductor, a paradigmatic quantum impurity problem. We realize such a system with an InAs semiconductor nanowire contacted by an Al-based superconducting electrode. We use an additional normal-type contact as weakly coupled tunnel probe to perform tunneling spectroscopy measurements of the elementary sub-gap excitations, known as Andreev bound states or Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states. We demonstrate that the energy of these states, $ζ$, scales with the ratio between the Kondo temperature, $T_K$, and the superconducting gap, $Δ$. $ζ$ vanishes for $T_K/Δ\approx 0.6$, denoting a quantum phase transition between spin singlet and doublet ground states. By further leveraging the gate control over the quantum dot parameters, we determine the singlet-doublet phase boundary in the stability diagram of the system. Our experimental results show remarkable quantitative agreement with numerical renormalization group calculations.

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Eduardo J. H. Lee, Xiaocheng Jiang, Rok Zitko, Ramon Aguado, Charles M. Lieber, Silvano De Franceschi. 2016-09-24. Scaling of sub-gap excitations in a superconductor-semiconductor nanowire quantum dot. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevb.95.180502

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