Vidya Madhavan(University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign)

Recent developments in topological superconductivity
Vidya Madhavan (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign)


Talk given at ICAM Global Summit 2020
Topological superconductors represent fundamentally new phases of matter. Similar to topological insulators, the non-trivial topological characteristics of a topological superconductor dictate the presence of a topological edge states composed of Bogoliubov quasiparticles which live inside and span the superconducting gap. The intense interest in these materials stems from the fact that Bogoliubov excitations inside the gap of a chiral p-wave superconductor are predicted to have all the characteristics of Majorana Fermions. Bulk topological superconductivity is predicted to occur in a few different materials classes. Well known examples are the nematic Sr or Nb doped Bi2Se3 and putative bulk p-wave superconductors like Sr2RuO4. This talk will describe recent developments in two classes of topologically non-trivial superconductors: bulk topological superconductors, and proximitized topological insulators where an effective time-reversal invariant generalization of p+ip superconductivity can be realized. Finally, I will show STM data on these two classes of materials: FeSexTe1x which is thought to be an example of an intrinsic proximitized topological insulator and UTe2, a heavy fermion bulk topological superconductor.