Experimental Observation of Topological Superconductivity and Majorana Zero Modes on beta-Bi2Pd Thin Films

Using a cryogenic scanning tunneling microscopy, we report the observation of topologically nontrivial superconductivity on a single material of \beta-Bi2Pd films grown by molecular beam epitaxy. The superconducting gap associated with spinless odd-parity pairing opens on the surface and appears muc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2017-06
Main Authors: Yan-Feng, Lv, Wen-Lin, Wang, Yi-Min, Zhang, Ding, Hao, Li, Wei, Wang, Lili, He, Ke, Can-Li, Song, Xu-Cun, Ma, Qi-Kun Xue
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Braiding
Epitaxial growth
Fermions
Molecular beam epitaxy
Parity
Superconductivity
Thin films
Topological superconductors
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Summary:Using a cryogenic scanning tunneling microscopy, we report the observation of topologically nontrivial superconductivity on a single material of \beta-Bi2Pd films grown by molecular beam epitaxy. The superconducting gap associated with spinless odd-parity pairing opens on the surface and appears much larger than the bulk one due to the Dirac-fermion enhanced parity mixing of surface pair potential. Majorana zero modes (MZMs), supported by such superconducting states, are identified at magnetic vortices. The superconductivity and MZMs exhibit resistance to nonmagnetic defects, characteristic of time-reversal-invariant topological superconductors. Our results demonstrate a simple platform to generate, manipulate and braid MZMs for quantum computation.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1607.07551