Scientists at Microsoft Quantum Lab have investigated a semiconductor transmon with an epitaxial Al shell fully surrounding an InAs nanowire core in the low EJ/EC regime.
Little-Parks oscillations as a function of flux along the hybrid wire axis are destructive, creating lobes of reentrant superconductivity separated by a metallic state at a half quantum of applied flux.
In the first lobe, phase winding around the shell can induce topological superconductivity in the core.
Coherent qubit operation has been observed in both the zeroth and first lobes.
Splitting of parity bands by coherent single-electron coupling across the junction is not resolved beyond line broadening, placing a bound on Majorana coupling, EM/h < 10 MHz, much smaller than the Josephson coupling EJ/h ∼ 4.7 GHz.