New directions in the pursuit of Majorana fermions in solid state systems
By J. Alicea. Reports on progress in physics. Physical Society, 2012
2,471 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The 1937 theoretical discovery of Majorana fermions—whose defining property is that they are their own anti-particles—has since impacted diverse problems ranging from neutrino physics and dark matter searches to the fractional quantum Hall effect and superconductivity. Despite this long history the unambiguous observation of Majorana fermions nevertheless remains an outstanding goal. This review paper highlights recent advances in the condensed matter search for Majorana that have led many in the field to believe that this quest may soon bear fruit. We begin by introducing in some detail exotic ‘topological’ one- and two-dimensional superconductors that support Majorana fermions at their boundaries and at vortices. We then turn to one of the key insights that arose during the past few years; namely, that it is possible to ‘engineer’ such exotic superconductors in the laboratory by forming appropriate heterostructures with ordinary s-wave superconductors. Numerous proposals of this type are discussed, based on diverse materials such as topological insulators, conventional semiconductors, ferromagnetic metals and many others. The all-important question of how one experimentally detects Majorana fermions in these setups is then addressed. We focus on three classes of measurements that provide smoking-gun Majorana signatures: tunneling, Josephson effects and interferometry. Finally, we discuss the most remarkable properties of condensed matter Majorana fermions—the non-Abelian exchange statistics that they generate and their associated potential for quantum computation.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Materials Chemistry, Physical and Theoretical Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/44ddcc1c350f65c068b94e8d377a1a5b31577ad4
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Citations in the corpus
- Anomalous zero-bias conductance peak in a Nb-InSb nanowire-Nb hybrid device. (2012, background): “However, the fundamental nature of Majorana fermions can be easily viewed using the second quantization notation in which the creation of a fermion such as an electron can be described by the excitation of two Majorana fermions [4, 5].”
- Probing atomic structure and Majorana wavefunctions in mono-atomic Fe chains on superconducting Pb surface (2015, background): “While intensely searched in particle physics as neutrinos, Majorana fermions have recently been predicted to occur as quasi-particle bound states in engineered solid-state systems [2].”
- Failure of Nielsen-Ninomiya Theorem and Fragile Topology in Two-Dimensional Systems with Space-Time Inversion Symmetry: Application to Twisted Bilayer Graphene at Magic Angle (2018, background): “The surface degrees of freedom are given by projecting the matrices under P (θ) = 12 (1 + iΓ1(θ)Γ3), and H 0 ≡ −(PΓ2P )Ri∂θ|r=R describes the two oppositely-propagating chiral edge states [67, 68, 78].”
- Colloquium : Nonequilibrium effects in superconductors with a spin-splitting field (2017, background): “Superconducting structures with strong spin-orbit coupling and exchange fields are also of high interest in view of engineering a platform for realization of topological phases and Majorana bound states (Alicea, 2012; Beenakker, 2013; Hasan and Kane, 2010; Qi and Zhang, 2011).”