Proposal for Manipulation of Majorana Fermions in Nano-Patterned Semiconductor-Superconductor Heterostructure

TL;DR

This paper proposes a nano-patterned heterostructure system for manipulating Majorana fermions using gate voltages, enabling braiding operations essential for topological quantum computing.

Contribution

It introduces a practical scheme for transporting and braiding Majorana fermions in a semiconductor-superconductor heterostructure with nano-patterned gates.

Findings

Successful numerical simulation of Majorana braiding via adiabatic switching.

Demonstration of non-Abelian statistics in the proposed system.

Fast braiding operations within several nanoseconds.

Abstract

We investigate a heterostructure system with a spin-orbit coupled semiconductor sandwiched by an s-wave superconductor and a ferromagnetic insulator, which supports Majorana fermions (MFs) at the superconducting vortex cores. We propose a scheme of transporting and braiding the MFs, which only requires application of point-like gate voltages in a system with nano-meter patterns. By solving the time-dependent Bogoliubov-de Gennes equation numerically, we monitor the time evolutions of MF wave-functions and show that the braiding of MFs with non-Abelian statistics can be achieved by adiabatic switching within several nano seconds.