Superconducting doped topological materials

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent progress in superconducting doped topological materials, emphasizing their potential to host Majorana fermions and their advantages like robustness against impurities.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the current understanding and developments in superconducting doped topological insulators and crystalline insulators for Majorana fermion research.

Findings

Superconducting doped topological materials can host Majorana fermions.

These materials exhibit robustness against nonmagnetic impurities.

Progress has been made in understanding time-reversal-invariant topological superconductors.

Abstract

Recently, the search for Majorana fermions (MFs) has become one of the most important and exciting issues in condensed matter physics since such an exotic quasiparticle is expected to potentially give rise to unprecedented quantum phenomena whose functional properties will be used to develop future quantum technology. Theoretically, the MFs may reside in various types of topological superconductor materials that is characterized by the topologically protected gapless surface state which are essentially an Andreev bound state. Superconducting doped topological insulators and topological crystalline insulators are promising candidates to harbor the MFs. In this review, we discuss recent progress and understanding on the research of MFs based on time-reversal-invariant superconducting topological materials to deepen our understanding and have a better outlook on both the search for and realization of MFs in these systems. We also discuss some advantages of these bulk systems to realize MFs including remarkable superconducting robustness against nonmagnetic impurities.