Search for Majorana Fermions in Superconductors

By C. Beenakker. 2011

1,584 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Majorana fermions (particles that are their own antiparticle) may or may not exist in nature as elementary building blocks, but in condensed matter they can be constructed out of electron and hole excitations. What is needed is a superconductor to hide the charge difference and a topological (Berry) phase to eliminate the energy difference from zero-point motion. A pair of widely separated Majorana fermions, bound to magnetic or electrostatic defects, has non-Abelian exchange statistics. A qubit encoded in this Majorana pair is expected to have an unusually long coherence time. I discuss strategies to detect Majorana fermions in a topological superconductor, as well as possible applications in a quantum computer. The status of the experimental search is reviewed.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c882b45fcd819928aa06658c89f738b1a1444c81

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Y. Ando
2. Masatoshi Sato
3. Hsin Lin
4. Arun Bansil
5. Tanmoy Das
6. A. Manchon
7. Bogdan Andrei Bernevig
8. Ashvin Vishwanath

In Condensed Matter Physics

1. Y. Ando
2. Masatoshi Sato
3. M. Silaev
4. Pauli Virtanen
5. T. Heikkilä
6. A. Manchon
7. F. Bergeret
8. Hongqi Xu

In Materials Chemistry

1. Y. Ando
2. Hsin Lin
3. Arun Bansil
4. Tanmoy Das
5. Masatoshi Sato
6. Bogdan Andrei Bernevig
7. Chaoxing Liu
8. Cui-Zu Chang

Citations in the corpus

• Milestones toward Majorana-based quantum computing (2015, neutral): “…Toward Majorana-Based Quantum Computing Aasen, David; Hell, Michael; Mishmash, Ryan V.; Higginbotham, Andrew Patrick; Danon, Jeroen; Leijnse, Martin Christian; Jespersen, Thomas Sand; Folk, Joshua; Marcus, Charles M.; Flensberg, Karsten; Alicea, Jason Published in: Physical…”
• High-resolution studies of the Majorana atomic chain platform (2016, background): “(3); here, ξ is the same for all sites) is presented in Fig.”
• New perspectives for Rashba spin-orbit coupling. (2015, background): “Topological superconductivity can be understood by a simple formula: topological insulator plus superconductivity [92].”
• Josephson radiation from gapless Andreev bound states in HgTe-based topological junctions (2016, background): “Majorana zero-modes can be conveniently engineered by inducing p-wave superconductivity in a two-dimensional topological insulator [2, 3] (2D TI).”
• Colloquium : Quantum anomalous Hall effect (2022, background): “Majorana modes exhibit non-local quantum exchange statistics and are promising as a platform for topological quantum computation (Alicea, 2012; Beenakker, 2013; Nayak et al., 2008).”