Event Details

Topological insulators coupled to conventional superconductors are predicted to host topological superconductivity and to support localized Majorana zero-modes. Majorana modes are predicted to obey non-Abelian exchange statistics, which makes them interesting building blocks for topological quantum computing. In this talk, I will focus on our recent experiments which show gate-tunable superconductivity in Type-II InAs/GaSb quantum wells, a two-dimensional topological insulator (2D TI). Using electrostatic gating, we induce superconductivity in all three transport regimes of our devices: bulk electron transport, edge mode transport and bulk hole transport. We extract the spatial distribution of the supercurrent in all three regimes by using superconducting quantum interference measurements. A clear transition to edge-dominated supercurrent is observed under conditions of high bulk resistivity. I will discuss possible experiments that could be used to detect Majorana modes and topological superconductivity in such 2D-TI-superconductor devices, and highlight some of the experimental challenges and opportunities.