A multi-institutional team of scientists in the United States, led by physicist Peng Wei at the University of California, Riverside, has developed a new superconductor material that could potentially be used in quantum computing and be a candidate "topological superconductor."
Topology is the mathematics of shape. A topological superconductor uses a delocalized state of an electron or hole (a hole behaves like an electron with positive charge) to carry quantum information and process data in a robust manner.
The researchers report in Science Advances that they combined trigonal tellurium with a surface state superconductor generated at the surface of a thin film of gold. The title of the paper is "Signatures of a Spin-Active Interface and Locally Enhanced Zeeman Field in a Superconductor-Chiral Material Heterostructure."
Trigonal tellurium is a chiral material, which means it cannot be superimposed on its mirror image, like our left and right hands. Trigonal tellurium is also non-magnetic. Nonetheless, the researchers observed quantum states at the interface that host well-defined spin polarization. The spin polarization allows the excitations to be potentially used for creating a spin quantum bit—or qubit.
"By creating a very clean interface between the chiral material and gold, we developed a two-dimensional interface superconductor," said Wei, an associate professor of physics and astronomy.
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