Phys.org November 25, 2022
Materials with intrinsic p-wave superconductivity, hosting Cooper pairs made of equal-spin electrons, have not been conclusively identified, nor synthesized, despite promising progress. Instead, engineered platforms where s-wave superconductors are brought into contact with magnetic materials have shown convincing signatures of equal-spin pairing. Researchers in the Netherlands have directly measured equal-spin pairing between spin-polarized quantum dots. The pairing is proximity-induced from an s-wave superconductor into a semiconducting nanowire with strong spin–orbit interaction. They demonstrated such pairing by showing that breaking a Cooper pair can result in two electrons with equal spin polarization. Their results demonstrated controllable detection of singlet and triplet pairing between the quantum dots. Triplet pairing in a sequence of quantum dots will be required for realizing an artificial Kitaev chain which is a promising method towards using topological qubits…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
fTransport processes, device and energy diagrams.
Credit: Nature (2022)