A new Majorana platform in an Fe-As bilayer superconductor

© 2020, The Author(s). Iron-chalcogenide superconductors have emerged as a promising Majorana platform for topological quantum computation. By combining topological band and superconductivity in a single material, they provide significant advantage to realize isolated Majorana zero modes. However, i...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Wenyao, Cao, Lu, Zhu, Shiyu, Kong, Lingyuan, Wang, Guangwei, Papaj, Michał, Zhang, Peng, Liu, Ya-Bin, Chen, Hui, Li, Geng, Yang, Fazhi, Kondo, Takeshi, Du, Shixuan, Cao, Guang-Han, Shin, Shik, Fu, Liang, Yin, Zhiping, Gao, Hong-Jun, Ding, Hong
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Springer Science and Business Media LLC 2022
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/141842
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Summary:© 2020, The Author(s). Iron-chalcogenide superconductors have emerged as a promising Majorana platform for topological quantum computation. By combining topological band and superconductivity in a single material, they provide significant advantage to realize isolated Majorana zero modes. However, iron-chalcogenide superconductors, especially Fe(Te,Se), suffer from strong inhomogeneity which may hamper their practical application. In addition, some iron-pnictide superconductors have been demonstrated to have topological surface states, yet no Majorana zero mode has been observed inside their vortices, raising a question of universality about this new Majorana platform. In this work, through angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy measurement, we identify Dirac surface states and Majorana zero modes, respectively, for the first time in an iron-pnictide superconductor, CaKFe4As4. More strikingly, the multiple vortex bound states with integer-quantization sequences can be accurately reproduced by our model calculation, firmly establishing Majorana nature of the zero mode.