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The use of III-V semiconductor nanowires can overcome the need for lattice matching in multi-junction solar cells, which restricts the choice of materials and their bandgaps. This work demonstrates efficient solar cells with GaAsP single nanowires with tunable bandgap and grown on low-cost Si substrates.

Fullerene peapods are carbon nanotubes encapsulating buckyball molecules. Here the authors show by low-temperature electron transport experiments, that the electronic states of nanotubes couple to the vibrational states of fullerenes, making the peapods a new class of nanoelectromechanical devices.

Andreev bound states in semiconductor–superconductor hybrid structures are studied using microwave spectroscopy — a tool that could be also used for investigating Majorana modes.

Despite more than a decade of study, single-wall carbon nanotubes still have the ability to surprise. One recent study finds that in ultraclean nanotubes an unexpectedly strong spin–orbit coupling arises; another demonstrates their ability to support one-dimensional Wigner crystals.

It was recently shown that a voltage could be used to control a supercurrent in superconducting nanostructures, much like a transistor, however, the exact origin of this effect has been debated. Here Elalaily et al. show via noise measurements that the suppression of the supercurrent in the superconducting device  arises due to excitation emission by inelastic tunneling of the electrons through the trap states created by stressing the oxide layer between the gate and the NW under a high electric field.

Semiconductor nanowires with superconducting leads are considered promising for quantum computation. The current–phase relation is systematically explored in gate-tunable InAs Josephson junctions, and is shown to provide a clean handle for characterizing the transport properties of these structures.

The authors experimentally study a chain of superconducting islands (SI) and quantum dots (QD), where a Bogoliubov quasiparticle occupies each SI. They demonstrate correlations between the quasiparticles in each SI mediated by a single spin on the QD, known as an “over-screened" doublet state of the QD.

The fate of Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states in the presence of a strong Coulomb repulsion in a superconductor remains unknown. Here, the authors couple a quantum dot to a superconducting island with a tunable Coulomb repulsion, where they find a singlet many-body state which, by a strong Coulomb repulsion, changes to a two-body state.

Semiconductor–superconductor hybrids are used for realizing complex quantum phenomena but are limited in the accessible magnetic field and temperature range. Now, hybrid devices made from InAs nanowires and epitaxially matched, single-crystal, atomically flat Pb films present superior characteristics, doubling the available parameter space.

The interplay of induced superconductivity and magnetic fields should drive InAs nanowires into a topological superconducting phase. Laroche et al. use the microwave radiation emitted by an InAs nanowire Josephson junction to observe the 4π-periodic Josephson effect, a hallmark of the topological phase.

Local magnetic moments coupled to superconductors can form subgap Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states. Here the authors show that Shiba states made with an InAs nanowire quantum dot have large spatial extent, which is beneficial for making Shiba chains that are predicted to host Majorana zero modes.

Topological Majorana bound states have potential for encoding, manipulating and protecting quantum information in condensed-matter systems. This Review discusses emergence and characterization of Majorana bound states in realistic devices based on hybrid semiconducting nanowires and their connection to more conventional Andreev bound states.

Weyl semimetals are a class of crystalline materials whose electronic band structure exhibits topologically protected degeneracy points, known as Weyl points. Here, the authors demonstrate both theoretically and experimentally that Weyl points can also be present in the magnetic-field dependent spectrum of a double quantum dot system, enjoying a similar topological protection.

Yu–Shiba–Rusinov subgap excitations are associated with a range of interesting physics such as Majorana fermions, and so it is important to understand their intrinsic features. Here, the authors investigate the temperature dependence of the Yu–Shiba–Rusinov states in a hybrid nanowire–quantum dot system, demonstrating that the shift in energy does not follow the behaviour predicted by current models.