Proximity superconductivity in atom-by-atom crafted quantum dots.

Publisher: Nature Publishing Group Country of Publication: England NLM ID: 0410462 Publication Model: Print-Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1476-4687 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 00280836 NLM ISO Abbreviation: Nature Subsets: PubMed not MEDLINE; MEDLINE

Publication: Basingstoke : Nature Publishing Group
Original Publication: London, Macmillan Journals ltd.

Gapless materials in electronic contact with superconductors acquire proximity-induced superconductivity in a region near the interface ^1,2 . Numerous proposals build on this addition of electron pairing to originally non-superconducting systems and predict intriguing phases of matter, including topological ^3-7 , odd-frequency ⁸ , nodal-point ⁹ or Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov ¹⁰ superconductivity. Here we investigate the most miniature example of the proximity effect on only a single spin-degenerate quantum level of a surface state confined in a quantum corral ¹¹ on a superconducting substrate, built atom by atom by a scanning tunnelling microscope. Whenever an eigenmode of the corral is pitched close to the Fermi energy by adjusting the size of the corral, a pair of particle-hole symmetric states enters the gap of the superconductor. We identify these as spin-degenerate Andreev bound states theoretically predicted 50 years ago by Machida and Shibata ¹² , which had-so far-eluded detection by tunnel spectroscopy but were recently shown to be relevant for transmon qubit devices ^13,14 . We further find that the observed anticrossings of the in-gap states are a measure of proximity-induced pairing in the eigenmodes of the quantum corral. Our results have direct consequences on the interpretation of impurity-induced in-gap states in superconductors, corroborate concepts to induce superconductivity into surface states and further pave the way towards superconducting artificial lattices.
(© 2023. The Author(s).)

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