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Many present and future applications of superconductivity would benefit from electrostatic control of carrier density and tunnelling rates, the hallmark of semiconductor devices. One particularly exciting application is the realization of topological superconductivity as a basis for quantum information processing. Proposals in this direction based on the proximity effect in semiconductor nanowires are appealing because the key ingredients are currently in hand. However, previous instances of proximitized semiconductors show significant tunnelling conductance below the superconducting gap, suggesting a continuum of subgap states-a situation that nullifies topological protection. Here, we report a hard superconducting gap induced by the proximity effect in a semiconductor, using epitaxial InAs-Al semiconductor-superconductor nanowires. The hard gap, together with favourable material properties and gate-tunability, makes this new hybrid system attractive for a number of applications, as well as fundamental studies of mesoscopic superconductivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report a systematic experimental study of mesoscopic conductance fluctuations in superconductor/normal/superconductor (SNS) devices Nb/InAs-nanowire/Nb. These fluctuations far exceed their value in the normal state and strongly depend on temperature even in the low-temperature regime. This dependence is attributed to high sensitivity of perfectly conducting channels to dephasing and the SNS fluctuations thus provide a sensitive probe of dephasing in a regime where normal transport fails to detect it. Further, the conductance fluctuations are strongly nonlinear in bias voltage and reveal subgap structure. The experimental findings are qualitatively explained in terms of multiple Andreev reflections in chaotic quantum dots with imperfect contacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-locality is a fundamental property of quantum mechanics that manifests itself as correlations between spatially separated parts of a quantum system. A fundamental route for the exploration of such phenomena is the generation of Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen (EPR) pairs of quantum-entangled objects for the test of so-called Bell inequalities. Whereas such experimental tests of non-locality have been successfully conducted with pairwise entangled photons, it has not yet been possible to realize an electronic analogue of it in the solid state, where spin-1/2 mobile electrons are the natural quantum objects. The difficulty stems from the fact that electrons are immersed in a macroscopic ground state—the Fermi sea—which prevents the straightforward generation and splitting of entangled pairs of electrons on demand. A superconductor, however, could act as a source of EPR pairs of electrons, because its ground-state is composed of Cooper pairs in a spin-singlet state. These Cooper pairs can be extracted from a superconductor by tunnelling, but, to obtain an efficient EPR source of entangled electrons, the splitting of the Cooper pairs into separate electrons has to be enforced. This can be achieved by having the electrons ‘repel’ each other by Coulomb interaction. Controlled Cooper pair splitting can thereby be realized by coupling of the superconductor to two normal metal drain contacts by means of individually tunable quantum dots. Here we demonstrate the first experimental realization of such a tunable Cooper pair splitter, which shows a surprisingly high efficiency. Our findings open a route towards a first test of the EPR paradox and Bell inequalities in the solid state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use the effective g factor of Andreev subgap states in an axial magnetic field to investigate how the superconducting density of states is distributed between the semiconductor core and the superconducting shell in hybrid nanowires. We find a steplike reduction of the Andreev g factor and an improved hard gap with reduced carrier density in the nanowire, controlled by gate voltage. These observations are relevant for Majorana devices, which require tunable carrier density and a g factor exceeding that of the parent superconductor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a device with a superconductor coupled to two parallel quantum dots (QDs) the electrical tunability of the QD levels can be used to exploit nonclassical current correlations due to the splitting of Cooper pairs. We experimentally investigate the effect of a finite potential difference across one quantum dot on the conductance through the other completely grounded QD in a Cooper pair splitter fabricated on an InAs nanowire. We demonstrate that the nonlocal electrical transport through the device can be tuned by electrical means and that the energy dependence of the effective density of states in the QDs is relevant for the rates of Cooper pair splitting (CPS) and elastic cotunneling. Such experimental tools are necessary to understand and develop CPS-based sources of entangled electrons in solid-state devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]