A Platform for Braiding Majorana Modes with Magnetic Skyrmions

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel platform combining topological superconductors and magnetic skyrmions, enabling the creation, braiding, and detection of Majorana modes using microwave cavity readout, advancing quantum computing research.

Contribution

It introduces a new heterostructure platform utilizing magnetic skyrmions to nucleate and braid Majorana modes, with a method for their readout via resonator frequency shifts.

Findings

Skyrmion stray fields can nucleate vortices hosting Majorana modes.

The proposed scheme can be realized with existing magnetic and superconducting materials.

Coupling to a resonator allows for parity-dependent detection of Majorana states.

Abstract

After a decade of intense theoretical and experimental efforts, demonstrating braiding of Majorana modes remains an unsolved problem in condensed matter physics due to platform specific challenges. In this work, we propose topological superconductor -- magnetic multilayer heterostructures with on-chip microwave cavity readout as a novel platform for initializing, braiding and reading out Majorana modes. Stray fields from a skyrmion in the magnetic layers can nucleate a vortex in the topological superconducting layer. Such a vortex is known to host Majorana bound states at its core. Through analytical calculations within London and Thiele formalisms, and through micromagnetic simulations, we show that our nucleation and braiding scheme can be effectively realized with a variety of existing options for magnetic and superconducting layers. Further, we show that the coupling of the Majorana bound states to electric field of a resonator leads to an experimentally observable parity-dependent dispersive shift of the resonator frequency. Our work paves the way for realizing Majorana braiding in the near future.