Electrostatic control of quasiparticle poisoning in a hybrid semiconductor-superconductor island

Abstract

The performance of superconducting devices is often degraded by the uncontrolled appearance and disappearance of quasiparticles, a process known as poisoning. We demonstrate electrostatic control of quasiparticle poisoning in the form of single-charge tunneling across a fixed barrier onto a Coulomb island in an InAs/Al hybrid nanowire. High-bandwidth charge sensing was used to monitor charge occupancy of the island across Coulomb blockade peaks, where tunneling rates were maximal, and Coulomb valleys, where tunneling was absent. Electrostatic gates changed on-peak tunneling rates by two orders of magnitude for a barrier with fixed normal-state resistance, which we attribute to gate dependence of the size and softness of the induced superconducting gap on the island, corroborated by separate density-of-states measurements. Temperature and magnetic field dependence of tunneling rates are also investigated.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Minimal Kitaev-transmon qubit based on double quantum dots
• Controllable Single Cooper Pair Splitting in Hybrid Quantum Dot Systems
• Tunable Capacitor For Superconducting Qubits Using an InAs/InGaAs Heterostructure
• Subgap states in semiconductor-superconductor devices for quantum technologies: Andreev qubits and minimal Majorana chains
• Flip-chip-based fast inductive parity readout of a planar superconducting island