Achievement

iQuISE IGERT trainee Valla Fatemi executed a summer internship in the lab of Charles Marcus at Harvard University in search of possible Majorana Bound States (MBS) in nanowire devices, which are theoretically attractive for use in quantum computational schemes. These states were claimed to be discovered in such devices in other groups via evidence related to a zero-bias peak in conductance. With collaborators, Fatemi successfully fabricated InSb nanowire devices with both superconducting and normal contacts and a variety of local gates, allowing a detailed study of this system at the cutting edge of the field. Results confirm data published by other groups while adding qualitatively new information: some data are consistent with an MBS interpretation while others are not. These results raise important questions about the nature of superconducting proximity effects in spin-orbit coupled nanostructures and the future of nanowire-based proposals for MBS-based quantum computation.