Spontaneous Formation of a Superconductor-Topological Insulator-Normal Metal Layered Heterostructure

Abstract

The discovery of graphene has spurred vigorous investigation of 2D materials, revealing a wide range of extraordinary properties and functionalities. 2D heterostructural materials have recently been fabricated by assembling isolated planes layer-by-layer in a desired sequence. Unusual properties and novel physical phenomena have been unveiled in such layered heterostructures. For example, Hofstadter's butterfly, an intriguing pattern of the energy states of Bloch electrons, was predicted several decades ago to be observable only under unfeasibly strong magnetic fields in conventional materials. But it has been observed recently under current experimental conditions in graphene/BN layered heterostructures, one of the outstanding new kinds of 2D materials. Moreover, another amazing physics phenomenon, Majorana fermions was predicted to exist in heterostructural systems consisting of a superconductor (SC) and a topological insulator (TI) Journal.

References in corpus (18)

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• Van der Waals heterostructures
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• Cloning of Dirac fermions in graphene superlattices
• Anomalous modulation of a zero bias peak in a hybrid nanowire-superconductor device
• Splitting of a Cooper pair by a pair of Majorana bound states

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Topological phases in the TaSe3 compound
• Coexistence of superconductivity and charge-density wave in the quasi-one-dimensional material HfTe3
• Topological Electronic States in HfRuP Family Superconductors
• Correlation-corrected band topology and topological surface states in iron-based superconductors
• A low-temperature scanning probe microscopy system with molecular beam epitaxy and optical access
• Nanomechanics of Antimonene Allotropes