A collaborative research team has identified the world's first multiple Majorana zero modes (MZMs) in a single vortex of the superconducting topological crystalline insulator SnTe and exploited crystal symmetry to control the coupling between the MZMs.
This discovery, published in Nature, offers a new pathway to realizing fault-tolerant quantum computers. The team was led by Prof. Junwei Liu, Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), and Prof Jinfeng Jia and Prof Yaoyi Li from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU).
MZM is a zero-energy topologically nontrivial quasiparticle in a superconductor that obeys non-Abelian statistics, allowing for inequivalent braiding sequences, even though the total number of exchanges is the same. This contrasts with ordinary particles, such as electrons or photons, where different braiding always results in the same final state. This unique property protects MZMs from local perturbations, making them an ideal platform for robust fault-tolerant quantum computation.
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