Kavli Affiliate: Michael Wimmer
| First 5 Authors: Tom Dvir, Guanzhong Wang, Nick van Loo, Chun-Xiao Liu, Grzegorz P. Mazur
| Summary:
Majorana bound states constitute one of the simplest examples of emergent
non-Abelian excitations in condensed matter physics. A toy model proposed by
Kitaev shows that such states can arise on the ends of a spinless $p$-wave
superconducting chain. Practical proposals for its realization require coupling
neighboring quantum dots in a chain via both electron tunneling and crossed
Andreev reflection. While both processes have been observed in semiconducting
nanowires and carbon nanotubes, crossed-Andreev interaction was neither easily
tunable nor strong enough to induce coherent hybridization of dot states. Here
we demonstrate the simultaneous presence of all necessary ingredients for an
artificial Kitaev chain: two spin-polarized quantum dots in an InSb nanowire
strongly coupled by both elastic co-tunneling and crossed Andreev reflection.
We fine-tune this system to a sweet spot where a pair of Majorana bound states
is predicted to appear. At this sweet spot, the transport characteristics
satisfy the theoretical predictions for such a system, including pairwise
correlation, zero charge, and stability against local perturbations of the
Majorana state. While the simple system presented here can be scaled to
simulate a full Kitaev chain with an emergent topological order, it can also be
used imminently to explore relevant physics related to non-Abelian anyons.
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