Synthetic spin-orbit interaction for Majorana devices.

The interplay of superconductivity with non-trivial spin textures is promising for the engineering of non-Abelian Majorana quasiparticles. Spin-orbit coupling is crucial for the topological protection of Majorana modes as it forbids other trivial excitations at low energy but is typically intrinsic to the material1-7. Here, we show that coupling to a magnetic texture can induce both a strong spin-orbit coupling of 1.1 meV and a Zeeman effect in a carbon nanotube. Both of these features are revealed through oscillations of superconductivity-induced subgap states under a change in the magnetic texture. Furthermore, we find a robust zero-energy state-the hallmark of devices hosting localized Majorana modes-at zero magnetic field. Our findings are generalizable to any low-dimensional conductor, and future work could include microwave spectroscopy and braiding operations, which are at the heart of modern schemes for topological quantum computation.

Observation of the frozen charge of a Kondo resonance.

The ability to control electronic states at the nanoscale has contributed to our modern understanding of condensed matter. In particular, quantum dot circuits represent model systems for the study of strong electronic correlations, epitomized by the Kondo effect. We use circuit quantum electrodynamics architectures to study the internal degrees of freedom of this many-body phenomenon. Specifically, we couple a quantum dot to a high-quality-factor microwave cavity to measure with exceptional sensitivity the dot's electronic compressibility, that is, its ability to accommodate charges. Because electronic compressibility corresponds solely to the charge response of the electronic system, it is not equivalent to the conductance, which generally involves other degrees of freedom such as spin. Here, by performing dual conductance and compressibility measurements in the Kondo regime, we uncover directly the charge dynamics of this peculiar mechanism of electron transfer. The Kondo resonance, visible in transport measurements, is found to be 'transparent' to microwave photons trapped in the high-quality cavity, thereby revealing that (in such a many-body resonance) finite conduction is achieved from a charge frozen by Coulomb interaction. This freezing of charge dynamics is in contrast to the physics of a free electron gas. We anticipate that the tools of cavity quantum electrodynamics could be used in other types of mesoscopic circuits with many-body correlations, providing a model system in which to perform quantum simulation of fermion-boson problems.

Photon-mediated interaction between distant quantum dot circuits.

Engineering the interaction between light and matter is an important goal in the emerging field of quantum opto-electronics. Thanks to the use of cavity quantum electrodynamics architectures, one can envision a fully hybrid multiplexing of quantum conductors. Here we use such an architecture to couple two quantum dot circuits. Our quantum dots are separated by 200 times their own size, with no direct tunnel and electrostatic couplings between them. We demonstrate their interaction, mediated by the cavity photons. This could be used to scale up quantum bit architectures based on quantum dot circuits or simulate on-chip phonon-mediated interactions between strongly correlated electrons.