Probing Ground-State Degeneracies of a Strongly Interacting Fermi-Hubbard Model with Superconducting Correlations

The Fermi-Hubbard model describes a large variety of condensed matter systems with spinful fermions and strong interactions. On the other hand, the Kitaev chain model deals with noninteracting spinless fermions and produces robust ground-state degeneracies that give rise to Majorana bound states. In this Letter, we connect these two domains by experimentally studying small arrays of quantum dots (QDs) coupled via superconductors. Without a magnetic field, this system constitutes a Fermi-Hubbard model with intersite superconducting correlations. Using two coupled QDs, we find sweet spots in parameter space where we observe zero-bias conductance peaks that are robust against on-site perturbations of the QDs, similar to the behavior expected of a two-site Kitaev chain. This observation is consistent with the presence of Majorana Kramers pairs or Z_{3} parafermions in this minimal system. Extending to three sites, we find that the spinful system scales very differently compared to the spinless Kitaev chain. When the same sweet-spot conditions are satisfied, the ground state degeneracy of the full three-site system is lifted. The degeneracy can be restored by tuning the superconducting phase difference between the hybrid segments, but the robustness against on-site detunings is lost. Our findings are a first step in studying ground-state degeneracies in strongly interacting Fermi-Hubbard systems with superconducting correlations.