11 Facts About Majorana fermion

Majorana fermion, referred to as a Majorana particle, is a fermion that is its own antiparticle.

The non-abelian statistics that Majorana fermion bound states possess allows them to be used as a building block for a topological quantum computer.

In 2008, Fu and Kane provided a groundbreaking development by theoretically predicting that Majorana fermion bound states can appear at the interface between topological insulators and superconductors.

Many proposals of a similar spirit soon followed, where it was shown that Majorana fermion bound states can appear even without any topological insulator.

An intense search to provide experimental evidence of Majorana fermion bound states in superconductors first produced some positive results in 2012.

Related searches

When exposed to a moderately strong magnetic field the apparatus showed a peak electrical conductance at zero voltage that is consistent with the formation of a pair of Majorana fermion bound states, one at either end of the region of the nanowire in contact with the superconductor.

Aforementioned experiments mark possible verifications of independent 2010 theoretical proposals from two groups predicting the solid state manifestation of Majorana fermion bound states in semiconducting wires proximitized to superconductors.

The subtle relation between those trivial bound states and Majorana fermion bound states was reported by the researchers in Niels Bohr Institute, who can directly "watch" coalescing Andreev bound states evolving into Majorana fermion bound states, thanks to a much cleaner semiconductor-superconductor hybrid system.

In 2014, evidence of Majorana fermion bound states was observed using a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope, by scientists at Princeton University.

On 16 August 2018, a strong evidence for the existence of Majorana fermion bound states in an iron-based superconductor, which many alternative trivial explanations cannot account for, was reported by Ding's and Gao's teams at Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, when they used scanning tunneling spectroscopy on the superconducting Dirac surface state of the iron-based superconductor.

One of the causes of interest in Majorana fermion bound states is that they could be used in quantum error correcting codes.