A road to reality with topological superconductors

Abstract

Topological states of matter are a source of low-energy quasiparticles, bound to a defect or propagating along the surface. In a superconductor these are Majorana fermions, described by a real rather than a complex wave function. The absence of complex phase factors promises protection against decoherence in quantum computations based on topological superconductivity. This is a tutorial style introduction written for a Nature Physics focus issue on topological matter.

pre-copy-editing, author-produced version of the published paper: 4 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (8)

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• Majorana Fermions and a Topological Phase Transition in Semiconductor-Superconductor Heterostructures
• Evidence of Majorana fermions in an Al - InAs nanowire topological superconductor
• Observation of Majorana Fermions in Ferromagnetic Atomic Chains on a Superconductor
• Observation of Majorana Fermions in a Nb-InSb Nanowire-Nb Hybrid Quantum Device
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Cited by in corpus (22)

• Periodic Table for Topological Bands with Non-Hermitian Bernard-LeClair Symmetries
• Revealing the magnetic proximity effect in EuS/Al bilayers through superconducting tunneling spectroscopy
• A comprehensive review on topological superconducting materials and interfaces
• Conventional Superconductivity in Type II Dirac Semimetal PdTe${}_2$
• Topological superconductivity in planar Josephson junctions: Narrowing down to the nanowire limit
• Detecting topological superconductivity using low-frequency doubled Shapiro steps
• Evolving Devil's staircase magnetization from tunable charge density waves in nonsymmorphic Dirac semimetals
• Electrically tunable topological superconductivity and Majorana fermions in two dimensions
• Space, matter and topology
• Conductance spectroscopy of nontopological-topological superconductor junctions
• Photonic Discrete-time Quantum Walks and Applications
• Evidence for Unconventional Superconductivity and Nontrivial Topology in PdTe
• Group theory study of the vibrational modes and magnetic order in the topological antiferromagnet MnBi${}_2$Te${}_4$
• Wiedemann-Franz-type relation between shot noise and thermal conduction of Majorana surface states in a three-dimensional topological superconductor
• Interaction-induced topological superconductivity in antiferromagnet-superconductor junctions
• Topological antiferromagnetic spintronics: Part of a collection of reviews on antiferromagnetic spintronics
• Bulk Superconductivity in the Dirac Semimetal TlSb
• Critical Current Anomaly at the Topological Quantum Phase Transition in a Majorana Josephson Junction
• Chirality inversion of Majorana edge modes in a Fu-Kane heterostructure
• Nonlinear optical response of Type-II Weyl fermions in two dimensions
• SnAs: a 4K weak type-II superconductor with non-trivial band topology
• Quantum theory for edge current and noise in two-dimensional topological superconductors