Dr. Javad Shabani, Assistant Professor of Physics Center for Discovery and Innovation, City College, City University of New York

"Two-dimensional Epitaxial Superconductor-Semiconductor Heterostructures: A Platform for Novel Superconducting Circuits"

Theory suggests that the interface between a one-dimensional semiconductor (Sm) with strong spin-orbit coupling and a superconductor (S) hosts Majorana modes with nontrivial topological properties. A key challenge in fabrication of such hybrid devices is forming highly transparent contacts between the active electrons in the semiconductor and the superconducting metal. Recently, it has been shown that a near perfect interface and a highly transparent contact can be achieved using epitaxial growth of aluminum on InAs nanowires. In this work, we present the first two-dimensional epitaxial superconductor-semiconductor material system that can serve as a platform for topological superconductivity, and the search for quasiparticles such as Majorana zero modes that are predicted to obey non-abelian statistics. We show that our material system, Al-InAs, satisfies all the requirements necessary to reach into the topological superconducting regime by individual characterization of the semiconductor two dimensional electron system, superconductivity of Al and performance of S-Sm-S junctions. This exciting development might lead to a number of useful applications ranging from spintronics to quantum computing.