Generic new platform for topological quantum computation using semiconductor heterostructures.

By J. Sau, R. Lutchyn, S. Tewari. Physical Review Letters, 2009

1,262 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that a film of a semiconductor in which s-wave superconductivity and Zeeman splitting are induced by the proximity effect, supports zero-energy Majorana fermion modes in the ordinary vortex excitations. Since time-reversal symmetry is explicitly broken, the edge of the film constitutes a chiral Majorana wire. The heterostructure we propose-a semiconducting thin film sandwiched between an s-wave superconductor and a magnetic insulator-is a generic system which can be used as the platform for topological quantum computation by virtue of the existence of non-Abelian Majorana fermions.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/380e3a79f661ced9bb93fb964292db55bfebe97e

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Masatoshi Sato
2. C. Beenakker
3. Y. Ando
4. J. Alicea
5. Nathan Goldman
6. C. Nayak
7. A. Stern
8. N. Lindner

Citations in the corpus

• Search for Majorana Fermions in Superconductors (2011, background): “In an s-wave superconductor a magnetic field closes the gap, but how to reopen it? A promising strategy is to rely on the competing effects of a spin-polarizing Zeeman energy and a depolarizing spin-orbit coupling [29, 30, 75].”
• Fractionalizing Majorana fermions: non-abelian statistics on the edges of abelian quantum Hall states (2012, background): “The search for non-Abelian systems originated from the Moore-Read theory [5] for the 1⁄4 5=2 fractional quantum Hall (FQH) state and went on to consider other quantumHall states [8,9], spin systems [10], p-wave superconductors [11–13], topological insulators coupled in proximity to superconductors [”
• Topological quantum matter with ultracold gases in optical lattices (2016, background): “More recently, it has become clear that p + ip and p-wave superconductors can be induced in conventional (proximity induced) superconductors due to the combination of spin-orbit coupling and Zeeman splitting [90].”
• Topology by dissipation in atomic quantum wires (2011, background): “The pair of Majorana edge modes represents a non-local fermion, which is a promising building block to encode topological qubit”