Bas Nijholt

Junctions created by coupling two superconductors via a semiconductor nanowire in the presence of high magnetic fields are the basis for detection, fusion, and braiding of Majorana bound states.

Spin-orbit interaction (SOI), a relativistic effect linking the motion of an electron (orbit) with its magnetic moment (spin), is an essential ingredient for various realisations of topological superconductivity, which host Majorana zero-modes, the building blocks of topological quantum computation.

Andreev bound states in hybrid superconductor-semiconductor devices can have near-zero energy in the topologically trivial regime as long as the confinement potential is sufficiently smooth.

Towards realistic numerical simulations of Majorana devices.

We develop a protocol to determine the presence and extent of a topological phase with Majorana zero modes in a hybrid superconductor-semiconductor device.