How do you measure Majorana bound states?
If you just started looking into Majorana bound states, you may already know how and when these states can occur in superconductors. However, you might wonder how you can actually measure whether you have succeeded in creating those states!
In this video, Michael Wimmer will explain how Andreev reflection in superconductors helps us to measure Majorana bound states. Furthermore, Michael discusses a few experimental papers that show significant progress in this field. Did you, for example, know that Majoranas only appear at a finite magnetic field? Find out more in the video!
Prerequisite knowledge
- Superconductors (e.g., Cooper pairs, energy gap)
- Majorana bound states, symmetry protection
Update: The Quantized Majorana Conductance (2018) paper that Michael mentions at the end of the video has been retracted and the authors have published a new paper with a different interpretation of the results.
Further Thinking
Can you name what ingredients are required in order to have Majorana zero modes?
Further reading
Take a look at the actual publications of the work presented in this video:
- V. Mourik et al., Science 336, 1003 (2012)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.2792 - S. Albrecht et al., Nature 531, 206 (2016)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03217 - H. Zhang et al., Nature 556, 74 (2018)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10701 - S. Nadj-Perge, Science 346, 6209 (2014)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.0682