Andreev bound states in supercurrent-carrying carbon nanotubes revealed

Abstract

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are not intrinsically superconducting but they can carry a supercurrent when connected to superconducting electrodes 1-4 . This supercurrent is mainly transmitted by discrete entangled electron-hole states confined to the nanotube, called Andreev bound states (ABS). These states are a key concept in mesoscopic superconductivity as they provide a universal description of Josephson-like effects in quantum-coherent nanostructures (for example molecules, nanowires, magnetic or normal metallic layers) connected to superconducting leads 5 . We report here the first tunnelling spectroscopy of individually resolved ABS, in a nanotube-superconductor device. Analysing the evolution of the ABS spectrum with a gate voltage, we show that the ABS arise from the discrete electronic levels of the molecule and that they reveal detailed information about the energies of these levels, their relative spin orientation and the coupling to the leads. Such measurements hence constitute a powerful new spectroscopic technique capable of elucidating the electronic structure of CNT-based devices, including those with well-coupled leads. This is relevant for conventional applications (for example, superconducting or normal transistors, superconducting quantum interference devices 3 (SQUIDs)) and quantum information processing (for example, entangled electron pair generation 6,7 , ABS-based qubits 8 ). Finally, our device is a new type of d.c.-measurable SQUID. © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.