Ballistic PbTe Nanowire Devices
Yuhao Wang, Fangting Chen, Wenyu Song, Zuhan Geng, Zehao Yu, Lining Yang, Yichun Gao, Ruidong Li, Shuai Yang, Wentao Miao, Wei Xu, Zhaoyu Wang, Zezhou Xia, Huading Song, Xiao Feng, Tiantian Wang, Yunyi Zang, Lin Li, Runan Shang, Qi‐Kun Xue, Ke He, Hao Zhang
Abstract
Disorder is the primary obstacle in the current Majorana nanowire experiments. Reducing disorder or achieving ballistic transport is thus of paramount importance. In clean and ballistic nanowire devices, quantized conductance is expected, with plateau quality serving as a benchmark for disorder assessment. Here, we introduce ballistic PbTe nanowire devices grown by using the selective-area-growth (SAG) technique. Quantized conductance plateaus in units of 2 e 2 / h are observed at zero magnetic field. This observation represents an advancement in diminishing disorder within SAG nanowires as most of the previously studied SAG nanowires (InSb or InAs) have not exhibited zero-field ballistic transport. Notably, the plateau values indicate that the ubiquitous valley degeneracy in PbTe is lifted in nanowire devices. This degeneracy lifting addresses an additional concern in the pursuit of Majorana realization. Moreover, these ballistic PbTe nanowires may enable the search for clean signatures of the spin–orbit helical gap in future devices.