Richardson model with complex level structure and spin-orbit coupling for hybrid superconducting islands: stepwise suppression of pairing and magnetic pinning

TL;DR

This paper investigates the complex electronic and magnetic properties of hybrid semiconductor-superconductor nanowires with quantum dots, revealing how spin-orbit coupling and magnetic fields influence their many-particle states and excitation energies.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive quantum impurity model that explains experimental observations of magnetic pinning and state oscillations in hybrid nanowires, highlighting the role of spin-orbit coupling.

Findings

Pinning of excitation energies at strong magnetic fields.

Collapse and zero-bias oscillations of Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states.

Spin-orbit coupling smooths out state oscillations.

Abstract

An epitaxial semiconductor-superconductor nanowire is a superconducting system with a complex level structure originating from hybridization: in addition to a dense set of higher-energy states derived predominantly from the metallic superconducting shell above the bulk gap $\Delta$, there is a smaller number of lower-energy proximitized states from the semiconducting core that define the induced gap $\Delta^*$. Nanostructures built from such nanowires can furthermore incorporate quantum dots in order to obtain localized spins for storing and manipulating quantum information. We discuss the magnetic field dependence in three devices with different combinations of embedded quantum dots and superconducting islands. For strong fields, they show pinning of excitation energies to a uniform spacing, even if for weak fields they have non-universal properties with different behaviors for even and odd number of confined electrons. We propose a quantum impurity model for hybrid devices that incorporates all relevant physical effects. We show that the model accounts for the key observations and permits unambiguous interpretation in terms of many-particle states. In particular, we study the replicas of the Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states in the hybrid gap, their collapse and oscillation around zero bias with increasing field, and the strong smoothing effect of the spin-orbit coupling (SOC) on these oscillations. We propose that the SOC-induced mixing of many-body states is a generic mechanism and that magnetic pinning is likely to be a ubiquitous feature in hybrid nanowires.