Proximity superconductivity in atom-by-atom crafted quantum dots

Gapless materials in electronic contact with superconductors acquire proximity-induced superconductivity in a region near the interface 1 , 2 . Numerous proposals build on this addition of electron pairing to originally non-superconducting systems and predict intriguing phases of matter, including topological 3 – 7 , odd-frequency 8 , nodal-point 9 or Fulde–Ferrell–Larkin–Ovchinnikov 10 superconductivity. Here we investigate the most miniature example of the proximity effect on only a single spin-degenerate quantum level of a surface state confined in a quantum corral 11 on a superconducting substrate, built atom by atom by a scanning tunnelling microscope. Whenever an eigenmode of the corral is pitched close to the Fermi energy by adjusting the size of the corral, a pair of particle–hole symmetric states enters the gap of the superconductor. We identify these as spin-degenerate Andreev bound states theoretically predicted 50 years ago by Machida and Shibata 12 , which had—so far—eluded detection by tunnel spectroscopy but were recently shown to be relevant for transmon qubit devices 13 , 14 . We further find that the observed anticrossings of the in-gap states are a measure of proximity-induced pairing in the eigenmodes of the quantum corral. Our results have direct consequences on the interpretation of impurity-induced in-gap states in superconductors, corroborate concepts to induce superconductivity into surface states and further pave the way towards superconducting artificial lattices.