Evidence for Majorana bound states in an iron-based superconductor
By Dongfei Wang, Lingyuan Kong, Peng Fan, Hui Chen, Shiyu Zhu, Wenyao Liu, Lu Cao, Yujie Sun, S. Du, J. Schneeloch and 5 more. Science, 2017
711 citations recorded by the source corpus.
An iron home for Majoranas The surface of the iron-based superconductor FeTe0.55Se0.45 has been identified as a potential topological superconductor and is expected to host exotic quasiparticles called the Majorana bound states (MBSs). Wang et al. looked for signatures of MBSs in this material by using scanning tunneling spectroscopy on the vortex cores formed by the application of a magnetic field. In addition to conventional states, they observed the characteristic zero-bias peaks associated with MBSs and were able to distinguish between the two, owing to the favorable ratios of energy scales in the system. Science, this issue p. 333 Scanning tunneling spectroscopy reveals signatures of Majorana bound states on the surface of FeTe1−xSex. The search for Majorana bound states (MBSs) has been fueled by the prospect of using their non-Abelian statistics for robust quantum computation. Two-dimensional superconducting topological materials have been predicted to host MBSs as zero-energy modes in vortex cores. By using scanning tunneling spectroscopy on the superconducting Dirac surface state of the iron-based superconductor FeTe0.55Se0.45, we observed a sharp zero-bias peak inside a vortex core that does not split when moving away from the vortex center. The evolution of the peak under varying magnetic field, temperature, and tunneling barrier is consistent with the tunneling to a nearly pure MBS, separated from nontopological bound states. This observation offers a potential platform for realizing and manipulating MBSs at a relatively high temperature.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5182b5114d79f76c05f838680832a919565a187e
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Citations in the corpus
- Angle-resolved photoemission studies of quantum materials (2020, neutral): “Scanning tunneling microscopy measurements discovered a zero bias peak in vortex cores, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for establishing a Majorana bound state (Wang et al., 2018).”
- Flat bands, strange metals and the Kondo effect (2023, neutral): “The localized electrons form local moments, understood in terms of the Hund’s rules of atomic physics, whereas the itinerant electrons form broad bands, well described by single-particle theories such as DFT.”
- Non-Abelian braiding on photonic chips (2021, background): “striking properties and intriguing applications in the topological quantum computing [4,5], the investigation of non-Abelian anyons and their braiding remains largely restricted to fermionic systems [10-16] and their realization still faces challenges such as stringent requirements of pristine mater”
- Colloquium : Quantum anomalous Hall effect (2022, background): “…heterostructures During the past decades, the search for Majorana modes has been a key activity of condensed matter physics(Das et al., 2012; Deng et al., 2012; Jeon et al., 2017; Kayyalha et al., 2020; Mourik et al., 2012; Nadj-Perge et al., 2014; Rokhinson et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2018a).”