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"Majorana bound states in magnetic skyrmions", Guang Yang et al., 2016

Reviewed December 17, 2023

Citation: Yang, Guang, et al. "Majorana bound states in magnetic skyrmions." Physical Review B 93.22 (2016): 224505.

Web: https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.00968

Tags: Physical, Hardware, Majorana-fermions


This paper gives a general argument for why, in the presence of skyrmions, superconducting Cooper pairs will split into electron-hole superpositions behaving as Majorana zero modes bound to the cores of skrymions. This paper has shown to be somewhat foundational in the theory of non-abelian statistics in magnetic/skrymionic systems. For instance,

> Rex, Stefan, Igor V. Gornyi, and Alexander D. Mirlin. "Majorana bound states in magnetic skyrmions imposed onto a superconductor." Physical Review B 100.6 (2019): 064504.

extended the proposal to include symrmions with odd azimuthal winding number, and

> Díaz, Sebastián A., et al. "Majorana bound states induced by antiferromagnetic skyrmion textures." Physical Review B 104.21 (2021): 214501.

showed that the same conclusion holds for skrymions in antiferromagnets. The paper

> Bedow, Jasmin, et al. "Topological superconductivity induced by a triple-q magnetic structure." Physical Review B 102.18 (2020): 180504.

showed that Majorana zero modes also appear in so-called "triple-q" magnetic structures. The key fact underlying all of these proposals is that the helical field is gauge equivalent to a uniform Zeeman field with Rashba spin orbit coupling, which is well-known to induce superconductivity by Fu and Kane:

> Braunecker, Bernd, et al. "Spin-selective Peierls transition in interacting one-dimensional conductors with spin-orbit interaction." Physical Review B 82.4 (2010): 045127.