We show a hard superconducting gap in a Ge-Si nanowire Josephson transistor up to in-plane magnetic fields of 250 mT, an important step toward creating and detecting Majorana zero modes in this system. A hard gap requires a highly homogeneous tunneling heterointerface between the superconducting contacts and the semiconducting nanowire. This is realized by annealing devices at 180 °C during which aluminum interdiffuses and replaces the germanium in a section of the nanowire. Next to Al, we find a superconductor with lower critical temperature (TC = 0.9 K) and a higher critical field (BC = 0.9-1.2 T). We can therefore selectively switch either superconductor to the normal state by tuning the temperature and the magnetic field and observe that the additional superconductor induces a proximity supercurrent in the semiconducting part of the nanowire even when the Al is in the normal state. In another device where the diffusion of Al rendered the nanowire completely metallic, a superconductor with a much higher critical temperature (TC = 2.9 K) and critical field (BC = 3.4 T) is found. The small size of these diffusion-induced superconductors inside nanowires may be of special interest for applications requiring high magnetic fields in arbitrary direction.

In the effort to develop disruptive quantum technologies, germanium is emerging as a versatile material to realize devices capable of encoding, processing and transmitting quantum information. These devices leverage the special properties of holes in germanium, such as their inherently strong spin–orbit coupling and their ability to host superconducting pairing correlations. In this Review, we start by introducing the physics of holes in low-dimensional germanium structures, providing key insights from a theoretical perspective. We then examine the materials-science progress underpinning germanium-based planar heterostructures and nanowires. We go on to review the most significant experimental results demonstrating key building blocks for quantum technology, such as an electrically driven universal quantum gate set with spin qubits in quantum dots and superconductor–semiconductor devices for hybrid quantum systems. We conclude by identifying the most promising avenues towards scalable quantum information processing in germanium-based systems.

We present a Josephson junction based on a Ge-Si core-shell nanowire with transparent superconducting Al contacts, a building block which could be of considerable interest for investigating Majorana bound states, superconducting qubits, and Andreev (spin) qubits. We demonstrate the dc Josephson effect in the form of a finite supercurrent through the junction and establish the ac Josephson effect by showing up to 23 Shapiro steps. We observe multiple Andreev reflections up to the sixth order, indicating that charges can scatter elastically many times inside our junction and that our interfaces between superconductor and semiconductor are transparent and have low disorder.

A Ge–Si core–shell nanowire is used to realize a Josephson field-effect transistor with highly transparent contacts to superconducting leads. By changing the electric field, access to two distinct regimes, not combined before in a single device, is gained: in the accumulation mode the device is highly transparent and the supercurrent is carried by multiple subbands, while near depletion, the supercurrent is carried by single-particle levels of a strongly coupled quantum dot operating in the few-hole regime. These results establish Ge–Si nanowires as an important platform for hybrid superconductor–semiconductor physics and Majorana fermions.

We present angle-dependent measurements of the effective g factor g in a Ge-Si core-shell nanowire quantum dot. g is found to be maximum when the magnetic field is pointing perpendicularly to both the nanowire and the electric field induced by local gates. Alignment of the magnetic field with the electric field reduces g significantly. g is almost completely quenched when the magnetic field is aligned with the nanowire axis. These findings confirm recent calculations, where the obtained anisotropy is attributed to a Rashba-type spin-orbit interaction induced by heavy-hole light-hole mixing. In principle, this facilitates manipulation of spin-orbit qubits by means of a continuous high-frequency electric field.