New platforms for Majorana zero modes

The prospect of fault-tolerant quantum computation based on Majorana zero modes (MZM) fuels significant research efforts. To date, evidence for MZM has mostly come from experiments on nanowires (1) and atomic chains (2). Demonstrating the MZM’s non-Abelian exchange statistics as a key step towards fault-tolerant quantum computation may, however, require other material platforms that offer enhanced topological gaps to suppress MZM poisoning, topological protection against material imperfections and the tunability of the MZM for realizing braiding operations.

We are excited about exploring novel MZM platforms following these paradigms by combining STM with transport experiments. This research will entail experiments on the MZM arising in the topological edge state of bismuth (Bi) (3), a platform that is not only accessible to STM experiments but that can also be realized in quantum transport experiment (4), offering enhanced flexibility to test different MZM manipulation schemes. Other efforts will address the realization of MZM in the topological edge state of monolayer WTe2 in van-der-Waal’s heterostructures (5, 6) and on platforms based on high temperature superconductors (7).

(1) V. Mourik et al., Science 336, 1003–1007 (2012).
(2) S. Nadj-Perge et al., Science 346, 602-607 (2014).
(3) B. Jäck et al., Science 364, 1255-1259 (2019).
(4) A. Murani et al., Nature Comms. 8, 15941 EP (2017).
(5). S. Wu et al., Science 359, 76-79 (2018).
(6). F. Lübke et al., Nature Physics 16, 526–530 (2020).
(7) Z. Yan et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 096803 (2018).