Searching for topological superconductors using ultrasound

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Brad Ramshaw (Cornell)
• Wednesday 27 November 2024, 16:00-17:00
• Small Lecture Theatre, Cavendish Laboratory, J.J. Thomson Avenue.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Lucas Sá.

For more than a century, superconductors have been the paradigmatic “quantum material”, providing fundamental discoveries like gauge symmetry breaking and impacting technologies from medical imaging to quantum computing. Despite their central importance, characterizing new types of superconductors is still a difficult task: all superconductors have zero resistance, but their more subtle properties related to entanglement and topology are hard to probe experimentally. I will introduce chiral topological superconductors in two dimensions – a type of superconductivity with a “knot” in the superconducting wave function. These superconductors can host Majorana edge modes and bound states in their vortex cores, but finding a real-life example has proven challenging. I will show how we use ultrasound – deforming a crystalline lattice in a manner not unlike how gravity waves deform spacetime – to test whether a particular superconductor has the “right ingredients” to be a 2D topological superconductor. I will present the progress we have made thus far – ruling out many proposed candidate materials and discovering an unexpected new type of superconductivity along the way – and give a prognosis for what I think the most promising route is for discovering a 2D topological superconductor.

This talk is part of the Cavendish Quantum Colloquium series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Cavendish Laboratory Seminars
• Cavendish Quantum Colloquium
• Centre for Health Leadership and Enterprise
• Featured lists
• ME Seminar
• Neurons, Fake News, DNA and your iPhone: The Mathematics of Information
• School of Physical Sciences
• Small Lecture Theatre, Cavendish Laboratory, J.J. Thomson Avenue
• Thin Film Magnetic Talks
• few29

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.