Paper MI-MoM2
Searching Majorana Fermion in Topological Insulator/Superconductor Heterojunction

Monday, October 28, 2013, 8:40 am, Room 202 A

Topological superconductors (TSCs) have attracted a great deal of attention recently because of the Majorana modes they host, which can be used in fault-tolerant quantum computation relying on their non-Abelian braiding statistics. While TSCs are very rare in nature, it has been proposed that an alternative way to realize them is by inducing superconductivity in the surface states of a topological insulator (TI) through the proximity effect (PE). Here we report the first experimental evidence for PE induced TSC in Bi₂Te₃/NbSe₂ heterojunction and the observation of Abrikosov vortices and core states. In particular, we found unusual splitting behavior in the zero-bias peak of the core states that may be attributed to the formation of Majorana fermions. Our work demonstrates the promise of using proximity effect induced TSC for realizing Majorana fermions and topological quantum computing.