Nonlocal measurement of quasiparticle charge and energy relaxation in proximitized semiconductor nanowires using quantum dots

Abstract

The lowest-energy excitations of superconductors do not carry an electric charge, as their wave function is equally electron-like and hole-like. This fundamental property is not easy to study in electrical measurements that rely on the charge to generate an observable signal. The ability of a quantum dot to act as a charge filter enables us to solve this problem and measure the quasiparticle charge in superconducting-semiconducting hybrid nanowire heterostructures. We report measurements on a three-terminal circuit, in which an injection lead excites a non-equilibrium quasiparticle distribution in the hybrid system, and the electron or hole component of the resulting quasiparticles is detected using a quantum dot as a tunable charge and energy filter. The results verify the chargeless nature of the quasiparticles at the gap edge and reveal the complete relaxation of injected charge and energy in a proximitized nanowire, resolving open questions in previous three-terminal experiments.

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• InAs-Al Hybrid Devices Passing the Topological Gap Protocol
• Local and Nonlocal Transport Spectroscopy in Planar Josephson Junctions
• Nonlocal conductance spectroscopy of Andreev bound states in gate-defined InAs/Al nanowires
• Electrostatic control of the proximity effect in the bulk of semiconductor-superconductor hybrids
• Heat-mode excitation in a proximity superconductor
• Multiterminal transport spectroscopy of subgap states in Coulomb-blockaded superconductors
• Spin-resolved spectroscopy using a quantum dot defined in InAs 2DEG
• Quantum Hall Bogoliubov Interferometer
• Fate of the superconducting state in floating islands of hybrid nanowire devices
• Characterizing local Majorana properties using Andreev states
• Conductance matrix symmetries of multiterminal semiconductor-superconductor devices