In a nanowire (NW) of a three-dimensional topological insulator (TI), the quantum confinement of topological surface states leads to a peculiar sub-band structure that is useful for generating Majorana bound states. Top-down fabrication of TINWs from a high-quality thin film would be a scalable technology with great design flexibility, but there has been no report on top-down-fabricated TINWs where the chemical potential can be tuned to the charge neutrality point (CNP). Here we present a top-down fabrication process for bulk-insulating TINWs etched from high-quality (BiSb)Te thin films without degradation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWireless technology relies on the conversion of alternating electromagnetic fields into direct currents, a process known as rectification. Although rectifiers are normally based on semiconductor diodes, quantum mechanical non-reciprocal transport effects that enable a highly controllable rectification were recently discovered. One such effect is magnetochiral anisotropy (MCA), in which the resistance of a material or a device depends on both the direction of the current flow and an applied magnetic field.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe non-trivial topology of three-dimensional topological insulators dictates the appearance of gapless Dirac surface states. Intriguingly, when made into a nanowire, quantum confinement leads to a peculiar gapped Dirac sub-band structure. This gap is useful for, e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLow-dimensional narrow band gap III-V compound semiconductors, such as InAs and InSb, have attracted much attention as one of promising platforms for studying Majorana zero modes and non-Abelian statistics relevant for topological quantum computation. So far, most of experimental studies were performed on hybrid devices based on one-dimensional semiconductor nanowires. In order to build complex topological circuits toward scalable quantum computing, exploring high-mobility two-dimensional (2D) III-V compound electron system with strong spin-orbit coupling is highly desirable.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVertical heterostructures of two-dimensional (2D) crystals have led to the observations of numerous exciting physical phenomena and presented the possibilities for technological applications, which strongly depend on the quality, interface, relative alignment, and interaction of the neighboring 2D crystals. The heterostructures or hybrids of graphene and superconductors offer a very interesting platform to study mesoscopic superconductivity and the interplay of the quantum Hall effect with superconductivity. However, so far the heterostructures of graphene and 2D superconductors are fabricated by stacking, and consequently suffer from random relative alignment, weak interfacial interaction, and unavoidable interface contaminants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderstanding of the electrical contact properties of semiconductor nanowire (NW) field-effect transistors (FETs) plays a crucial role in the use of semiconducting NWs as building blocks for future nanoelectronic devices and in the study of fundamental physics problems. Here, we report on a study of the contact properties of Ti/Au, a widely used contact metal combination, when contacting individual InSb NWs via both two-probe and four-probe transport measurements. We show that a Schottky barrier of height [Formula: see text] is present at the metal-InSb NW interfaces and its effective height is gate-tunable.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report on realization and transport spectroscopy study of single quantum dots (QDs) made from InSb nanowires grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). The nanowires employed are 50-80 nm in diameter and the QDs are defined in the nanowires between the source and drain contacts on a Si/SiO2 substrate. We show that highly tunable QD devices can be realized with the MBE-grown InSb nanowires and the gate-to-dot capacitance extracted in the many-electron regimes is scaled linearly with the longitudinal dot size, demonstrating that the devices are of single InSb nanowire QDs even with a longitudinal size of ∼700 nm.
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