Selective area epitaxy of PbTe-Pb hybrid nanowires on a lattice-matched substrate

TL;DR

This paper reports the successful fabrication of PbTe-Pb hybrid nanowires on a lattice-matched CdTe substrate using combined selective area and shadow-wall growth techniques, promising for topological quantum computing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to grow high-quality PbTe-Pb hybrid nanowires on a lattice-matched substrate, reducing disorder and improving interface quality for Majorana-based quantum devices.

Findings

Nanowires are single-crystal with atomically sharp interfaces.

Interfaces show no noticeable inter-diffusion or strain.

The system has potential for studying Majorana zero modes.

Abstract

Topological quantum computing is based on braiding of Majorana zero modes encoding topological qubits. A promising candidate platform for Majorana zero modes is semiconductor-superconductor hybrid nanowires. The realization of topological qubits and braiding operations requires scalable and disorder-free nanowire networks. Selective area growth of in-plane InAs and InSb nanowires, together with shadow-wall growth of superconductor structures, have demonstrated this scalability by achieving various network structures. However, the noticeable lattice mismatch at the nanowire-substrate interface, acting as a disorder source, imposes a serious obstacle along with this roadmap. Here, combining selective area and shadow-wall growth, we demonstrate the fabrication of PbTe-Pb hybrid nanowires - another potentially promising Majorana system - on a nearly perfectly lattice-matched substrate CdTe, all done in one molecular beam epitaxy chamber. Transmission electron microscopy shows the single-crystal nature of the PbTe nanowire and its atomically sharp and clean interfaces to the CdTe substrate and the Pb overlayer, without noticeable inter-diffusion or strain. The nearly ideal interface condition, together with the strong screening of charge impurities due to the large dielectric constant of PbTe, hold promise towards a clean nanowire system to study Majorana zero modes and topological quantum computing.