Hole-doped semiconductor nanowire on top of an s-wave superconductor: A new and experimentally accessible system for Majorana fermions

Abstract

Majorana fermions were envisioned by E. Majorana in 1935 to describe neutrinos. Recently it has been shown that they can be realized even in a class of electron-doped semiconductors, on which ordinary s-wave superconductivity is proximity induced, provided the time reversal symmetry is broken by an external Zeeman field above a threshold. Here we show that in a hole-doped semiconductor nanowire the threshold Zeeman field for Majorana fermions can be very small for some magic values of the hole density. In contrast to the electron-doped systems, smaller Zeeman fields and much stronger spin-orbit coupling and effective mass of holes allow the hole-doped systems to support Majorana fermions in a parameter regime which is routinely realized in current experiments.

5 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Lett