Correction to: Nature Communicationshttps://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms16025, published online 06 July 2017 The original version of this Article included the authors Kun Zuo and Vincent Mourik who wish to be removed from authorship. Consequently, the author affiliations for these authors have been removed from the ‘Authors and Affiliations’ section. The original version of the ‘Contributions’ statement, which read “H.Z. and Ö.G. fabricated the devices, performed the measurements and analysed the data. S.C.-B. performed the TEM analysis. M.P.N. and M.W. performed the numerical simulations. K.Z., V.M., F.K.d.V., J.v.V., M.W.A.d.M., J.D.S.B., D.J.v.W., M.Q.-P., M.C.C. and S.G. contributed to the experiments. D.C., S.P. and E.P.A.M.B. grew the InSb nanowires. S.K. prepared the lamellae for the TEM analysis. K.W. and T.T. synthesized the h-BN crystals. L.P.K. supervised the project. All authors contributed to the writing of the manuscript”, has been amended to read “H.Z. and Ö.G. fabricated the devices, performed the measurements and analysed the data. S.C.-B. performed the TEM analysis. M.P.N. and M.W. performed the numerical simulations. F.K.d.V., J.v.V., M.W.A.d.M., J.D.S.B., D.J.v.W., M.Q.-P., M.C.C. and S.G. contributed to the experiments. D.C., S.P. and E.P.A.M.B. grew the InSb nanowires. S.K. prepared the lamellae for the TEM analysis. K.W. and T.T. synthesized the h-BN crystals. L.P.K. supervised the project. All authors contributed to the writing of the manuscript”. This has been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the article.

Nature Communications is publishing an editorial expression of concern on the article “Ballistic superconductivity in semiconductor nanowires”, by H. Zhang et al. On 09 December 2021, the Editorial Staff was alerted by Vincent Mourik and two other researchers to potential problems in the manner in which raw data have been selected, processed and analysed. In response to these concerns, Nature Communications initiated an investigation by contacting the corresponding authors of the article and consulting with two independent experts. The investigation involved technical scrutiny of the additional analyses provided by the corresponding authors, including supplementary data from the repository https://zenodo.org/records/6851435. Based on the evidence presented, the Reviewers endorsed the publication of the correction note appended below. Readers are urged to take this information into consideration when interpreting the data presented in this article. Kun Zuo and Vincent Mourik also informed the editorial staff that they wished to be removed from authorship because in their opinion, the correction does not address the concerns with respect to the data and they do not endorse the validity of the claims and conclusions of the article. The author list in both the PDF and HTML has now been rectified. All authors,with the exception ofKenjiWatanabe and Takashi Taniguchi, disagreewith the publication of this Editorial Expression of Concern.

In superconducting quantum circuits, aluminum is one of the most widely used materials. It is currently also the superconductor of choice for the development of topological qubits. However, aluminum-based devices suffer from poor magnetic field compatibility. Herein, this limitation is resolved by showing that adatoms of heavy elements (e.g., platinum) increase the critical field of thin aluminum films by more than a factor of two. Using tunnel junctions, it is shown that the increased field resilience originates from spin-orbit scattering introduced by Pt. This property is exploited in the context of the superconducting proximity effect in semiconductor–superconductor hybrids, where it is shown that InSb nanowires strongly coupled to Al/Pt films can maintain superconductivity up to 7 T. The two-electron charging effect is shown to be robust against the presence of heavy adatoms. Additionally, non-local spectroscopy is used in a three-terminal geometry to probe the bulk of hybrid devices, showing that it remains free of sub-gap states. Finally, it is demonstrated that proximitized semiconductor states maintain their ability to Zeeman-split in an applied magnetic field. Combined with the chemical stability and well-known fabrication routes of aluminum, Al/Pt emerges as the natural successor to Al-based systems and is a compelling alternative to other superconductors, whenever high-field resilience is required.

We systematically study three-terminal InSb-Al nanowire devices by using radio-frequency reflectometry. Tunneling spectroscopy measurements on both ends of the hybrid nanowires are performed while systematically varying the chemical potential, magnetic field, and junction transparencies. Identifying the lowest-energy state allows for the construction of the lowest- and zero-energy state diagrams, which show how the states evolve as a function of the aforementioned parameters. Importantly, comparing the diagrams taken for each end of the hybrids enables the identification of states which do not coexist simultaneously, ruling out a significant amount of the parameter space as candidates for a topological phase. Furthermore, altering junction transparencies filters out zero-energy states sensitive to a local gate potential. Such a measurement strategy significantly reduces the time necessary to identify a potential topological phase and minimizes the risk of falsely recognizing trivial bound states as Majorana zero modes.

Semiconducting–superconducting hybrids are vital components for the realization of high-performance nanoscale devices. In particular, semiconducting–superconducting nanowires attract widespread interest owing to the possible presence of non-abelian Majorana zero modes, which are quasiparticles that hold promise for topological quantum computing. However, systematic search for Majoranas signatures is challenging because it requires reproducible hybrid devices and reliable fabrication methods. This work introduces a fabrication concept based on shadow walls that enables the in situ, selective, and consecutive depositions of superconductors and normal metals to form normal-superconducting junctions. Crucially, this method allows to realize devices in a single shot, eliminating fabrication steps after the synthesis of the fragile semiconductor/superconductor interface. At the atomic level, all investigated devices reveal a sharp and defect-free semiconducting–superconducting interface and, correspondingly, a hard induced superconducting gap resilient up to 2 T is measured electrically. While the cleanliness of the technique enables systematic studies of topological superconductivity in nanowires, it also allows for the synthesis of advanced nano-devices based on a wide range of material combinations and geometries while maintaining an exceptionally high interface quality.

The realization of hybrid superconductor–semiconductor quantum devices, in particular a topological qubit, calls for advanced techniques to readily and reproducibly engineer induced superconductivity in semiconductor nanowires. Here, we introduce an on-chip fabrication paradigm based on shadow walls that offers substantial advances in device quality and reproducibility. It allows for the implementation of hybrid quantum devices and ultimately topological qubits while eliminating fabrication steps such as lithography and etching. This is critical to preserve the integrity and homogeneity of the fragile hybrid interfaces. The approach simplifies the reproducible fabrication of devices with a hard induced superconducting gap and ballistic normal-/superconductor junctions. Large gate-tunable supercurrents and high-order multiple Andreev reflections manifest the exceptional coherence of the resulting nanowire Josephson junctions. Our approach enables the realization of 3-terminal devices, where zero-bias conductance peaks emerge in a magnetic field concurrently at both boundaries of the one-dimensional hybrids.

Superconducting coplanar-waveguide resonators that can operate in strong magnetic fields are important tools for a variety of high-frequency superconducting devices. Magnetic fields degrade resonator performance by creating Abrikosov vortices that cause resistive losses and frequency fluctuations or suppress the superconductivity entirely. To mitigate these effects, we investigate lithographically defined artificial defects in resonators fabricated from Nb-Ti-N superconducting films. We show that by controlling the vortex dynamics, the quality factor of resonators in perpendicular magnetic fields can be greatly enhanced. Coupled with the restriction of the device geometry to enhance the superconductors critical field, we demonstrate stable resonances that retain quality factors ≃105 at the single-photon power level in perpendicular magnetic fields up to B⊥ ≃20mT and parallel magnetic fields up to B⥠≃6T. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique for hybrid systems by integrating an In-Sb nanowire into a field-resilient superconducting resonator and use it to perform fast charge readout of a gate-defined double quantum dot at B=1T.