Gate-Defined Wires in HgTe Quantum Wells: From Majorana Fermions to Spintronics

Gate-Defined Wires in HgTe Quantum Wells: From Majorana Fermions to Spintronics

Blog Article

We introduce a promising new platform for Majorana zero modes and various spintronics applications based on gate-defined wires in HgTe quantum wells.Because of the Dirac-like band structure for HgTe, the physics of such systems differs markedly from that of Powders conventional quantum wires.Most strikingly, we show that the subband parameters for gate-defined HgTe wires exhibit exquisite tunability: Modest gate voltage variation allows one to modulate the Rashba spin-orbit energies from zero up to about 30 K, and the effective g factors from zero up to giant values exceeding 600.The large achievable spin-orbit coupling and g factors together allow one to access Majorana modes in this setting at exceptionally low magnetic fields while maintaining robustness against disorder.

As an additional benefit, gate-defined wires (in HgTe or other settings) should greatly facilitate the fabrication of networks for refined transport experiments used to detect Majoranas, as well as the Shooting Mittens realization of non-Abelian statistics and quantum information devices.