High-temperature Majorana fermions in magnet-superconductor hybrid systems

Abstract

Magnet-superconductor hybrid (MSH) structures represent one of the most promising platforms to realize, control, and manipulate Majorana modes using scanning tunneling methods. By depositing either chains or islands of magnetic atoms on the surface of a conventional, elemental superconductor such as Pb or Re, topological superconducting phases can emerge. They feature either localized Majorana bound states at the chain ends or dispersing chiral Majorana modes at the island's boundary. Yet some of these experiments have not reached the spectral resolution to clearly distinguish between topological Majorana and trivial Shiba states due to very small superconducting gap sizes and experiments pe..