2018/11/16 by Biplab Bhattacharyya, V. P. S. Awana, T. D. Senguttuvan +2 · 30 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Chemical and Physical Properties of Materials #MAJORANA #Majorana fermion #Nanowire #Quantum #Quantum computer #Superconductivity #Supercurrent #Surface and Thin Film Phenomena #Topological Materials and Phenomena #Topological insulator #Topology (electrical circuits) #cond-mat.mes-hall #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41598-018-35424-1
published in Scientific Reports 8(1), 17237 (Nature Portfolio) · 12 pages
openalex publication_date 2018/11/16 · arxiv created 2018/11/22 · arxiv updated 2018/11/26 · openalex created_date 2018/11/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract Proximity-induced superconducting energy gap in the surface states of topological insulators has been predicted to host the much wanted Majorana fermions for fault-tolerant quantum computation. Recent theoretically proposed architectures for topological quantum computation via Majoranas are based on large networks of Kitaev’s one-dimensional quantum wires, which pose a huge experimental challenge in terms of scalability of the current single nanowire based devices. Here, we address this problem by realizing robust superconductivity in junctions of fabricated topological insulator (Bi 2 Se 3 ) nanowires proximity-coupled to conventional s-wave superconducting (W) electrodes. Milling technique possesses great potential in fabrication of any desired shapes and structures at nanoscale level, and therefore can be effectively utilized to scale-up the existing single nanowire based design into nanowire based network architectures. We demonstrate the dominant role of ballistic topological surface states in propagating the long-range proximity induced superconducting order with high I c R N product in long Bi 2 Se 3 junctions. Large upper critical magnetic fields exceeding the Chandrasekhar-Clogston limit suggests the existence of robust superconducting order with spin-triplet cooper pairing. An unconventional inverse dependence of I c R N product on the width of the nanowire junction was also observed.