Jason Alicea (Caltech)

Date: Thu. October 19th, 2017, 4:00 pm-5:00 pm
Location: Rockefeller 301

Majorana Materializes 

In 1937 Ettore Majorana introduced the concept of what are now fittingly called Majorana fermions — fermionic particles that are their own antiparticles. Nowadays an active search for condensed-matter analogues of these elusive objects is well underway, motivated by both the prospect of revealing new facets of quantum mechanics and longer-term quantum computing applications. This talk will survey recent advances in this pursuit. In particular, I will describe strategies for “engineering” Majorana platforms from simple building blocks, preliminary experimental successes, and future milestones that reveal foundational aspects of Majorana physics directly relevant for quantum computation.