Platform for braiding Majorana modes with magnetic skyrmions

Abstract

After a decade of intense theoretical and experimental efforts, demonstrating braiding of Majorana modes remains an unsolved problem in condensed matter physics due to platform-specific challenges. In this work, we propose topological superconductor–magnetic multilayer heterostructures with on-chip microwave cavity readout as a platform for initializing, braiding, and reading out Majorana modes. Stray fields from a skyrmion in the magnetic layers can nucleate a vortex in the topological superconducting layer. Such a vortex is known to host Majorana bound states at its core. Through analytical calculations within London and Thiele formalisms, and through micromagnetic simulations, we show that our nucleation and braiding scheme can be effectively realized with a variety of existing options for magnetic and superconducting layers. Furthermore, we show that the coupling of the Majorana bound states to the electric field of a resonator leads to an experimentally observable parity-dependent dispersive shift of the resonator frequency. Our work paves the way for realizing Majorana braiding in the near future.