Disorder mitigation in PbTe-Pb Majorana nanowires

Material challenges remain a central obstacle in Majorana research, where surface disorder constrains device performance. Here, we report progress on disorder mitigation in PbTe nanowires for the realization of Majorana zero modes. We embedded PbTe nanowires within a lattice-constant-matched crystal. The wire edges are defined by self-organized growth instead of lithography, resulting in nearly atomically flat facets along both cross-sectional and longitudinal directions. Consequently, quantized conductance is observed at zero magnetic field with ballistic channel lengths up to 1.7 μm, significantly surpassing the state-of-the-art III-V nanowires. In PbTe-Pb hybrid nanowires, we observed ballistic transport, hard gap, and quantized Andreev conductance, a hallmark of low disorder. In addition, zero bias conductance peaks emerge at finite magnetic fields and remain robust in the gate and field scans. We then demonstrate the material approach towards advanced PbTe-Pb devices for three-terminal correlation and topological qubits.