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Materials

Atomic heteroepitaxy for topological superconductivity

Nature Materials volume 22, pages 538–539 (2023)Cite this article

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Epitaxial topological heterostructures of (Bi,Sb)2Te3/graphene/gallium have been achieved using molecular-beam epitaxy, providing the opportunity to access Majorana zero modes in electrical transport when combined with van der Waals tunnel junctions.

In a superconducting system, the broken electronic gauge symmetry allows for the realization of Majorana fermions (identical to their antiparticles) by freezing the spin degrees of freedom in Cooper pairs. A zero-energy Majorana bound state can present itself in the core of a half-quantum vortex in a spinless p-wave superconductor2. Braiding of these vortices follows non-abelian statistics to encode non-local information3, and particle–hole symmetry ensures that they are electrically neutral; therefore, the MZMs are rarely affected by impurities and are topologically protected4. The spinless condition was resolved by inducing Cooper pairs into the surface states of a strong topological insulator that is spin-momentum locked, which results in a time-reversal invariant p-wave-like paired state hosting MZMs5.

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Fig. 1: Scanning transmission electron microscopy image of BST/Gr/Ga heterostructures and schematic of the vdW tunnel junction.

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  1. State Key Laboratory of Surface Physics and Department of Physics, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Faxian Xiu

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  1. Faxian Xiu
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Correspondence to Faxian Xiu.

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Xiu, F. Atomic heteroepitaxy for topological superconductivity. Nat. Mater. 22, 538–539 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-023-01533-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-023-01533-0

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