Hybrid InSb nanowire-superconductor devices are promising for investigating Majorana modes and topological quantum computation in solid-state devices. An experimental realisation of ballistic, phase-coherent superconductor-nanowire hybrid devices is a necessary step towards engineering topological superconducting electronics. Here, we report on a low-temperature transport study of Josephson junction devices fabricated from InSb nanowires grown by molecular-beam epitaxy and provide a clear evidence for phase-coherent, ballistic charge transport through the nanowires in the junctions. We demonstrate that our devices show gate-tunable proximity-induced supercurrent and clear signatures of multiple Andreev reflections in the differential conductance, indicating phase-coherent transport within the junctions. We also observe periodic modulations of the critical current that can be associated with the Fabry-Pérot interference in the nanowires in the ballistic transport regime. Our work shows that the InSb nanowires grown by molecular-beam epitaxy are of excellent material quality and hybrid superconducting devices made from these nanowires are highly desirable for investigation of the novel physics in topological states of matter and for applications in topological quantum electronics.

We report low-temperature magnetotransport studies of individual InAs nanowires grown by molecule beam epitaxy. At low magnetic fields, the magnetoconductance characteristics exhibit a crossover between weak antilocalization and weak localization by changing either the gate voltage or the temperature. The observed crossover behavior can be well described in terms of relative scales of the transport characteristic lengths extracted based on the quasi-one-dimensional theory of weak localization in the presence of spin-orbit interaction. The spin relaxation length extracted from the magnetoconductance data is found to be in the range of 80–100 nm, indicating the presence of strong spin-orbit coupling in the InAs nanowires. Moreover, the amplitude of universal conductance fluctuations in the nanowires is found to be suppressed at low temperatures due to the presence of strong spin-orbit scattering.

We observe a crossover from electron-phonon (ep) coupling limited energy relaxation to that governed by thermal boundary resistance (pp) in copper films at sub-kelvin temperatures. Our measurement yields a quantitative picture of heat currents, in terms of temperature dependences and magnitudes, in both ep and pp limited regimes, respectively. We show that by adding a third layer in between the copper film and the substrate, the thermal boundary resistance is increased fourfold, consistent with an assumed series connection of thermal resistances.

We 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. In the few-electron regime, the quantum levels in the QDs are resolved and the Landég-factors extracted for the quantum levels from the magnetotransport measurements are found to be strongly level-dependent and fluctuated in a range of 18-48. A spin-orbit coupling strength is extracted from the magnetic field evolutions of a ground state and its neighboring excited state in an InSb nanowire QD and is on the order of ∼300 μeV. Our results establish that the MBE-grown InSb nanowires are of high crystal quality and are promising for the use in constructing novel quantum devices, such as entangled spin qubits, one-dimensional Wigner crystals and topological quantum computing devices.