Journal article

Aharonov-Bohm interference as a probe of Majorana fermions

TC Bartolo, JS Smith, B Muralidharan, C Müller, TM Stace, JH Cole

Physical Review Research | Published : 2020

Open access

Abstract

Majorana fermions act as their own antiparticle, and they have long been thought to be confined to the realm of pure theory. However, interest in them has recently resurfaced, as it was realized through the work of Kitaev that some experimentally accessible condensed matter systems can host these exotic excitations as bound states on the boundaries of one-dimensional chains, and that their topological and non-Abelian nature holds promise for quantum computation. Unambiguously detecting the experimental signatures of Majorana bound states has turned out to be challenging, as many other phenomena lead to similar experimental behavior. Here, we computationally study a ring comprised of two Kita..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

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Funding Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge useful discussions with S. Rachel. The authors would also like to thank J. A. Vaitkus and M. J. Cyster for providing MATLAB code. This work was supported by the Australian Research Council through Grants No. CE170100039 (FLEET) and No. CE170100009 (EQUS). C.M. is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation through NCCR Quantum Science and Technology (QSIT). B.M. would like to acknowledge funding from the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), Government of India, Grant No. STARS/APR2019/NS/226/FS under the STARS scheme and the Visvesvaraya Scheme of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeiTy), Government of India. This research was undertaken with the assistance of resources from the National Computational Infrastructure, which is supported by the Australian Government.